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EXTRAORDINARY

ENCOUNTERS

An Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrials
and Otherworldly Beings

Jerome Clark

ABC-CLIO

Santa Barbara, California
Denver, Colorado
Oxford, England

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of
brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Clark, Jerome.

Extraordinary encounters : an encyclopedia of extraterrestrials and
otherworldly beings / Jerome Clark,
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-57607-249-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)—ISBN 1-57607-379-3 (e-book)
1. Human-alien encounters—Encyclopedias. I. Title.

BF2050.C57 2000

001.942’03—dc21 00-011350

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ABC-CLIO, Inc.

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Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911

This book is printed on acid-free paper (§).

Manufactured in the United States of America.

To Dakota Dave Hull and John Sherman,
for the many years of friendship, laughs, and — always—good music

Contents

Introduction, xi

EXTRAORDINARY ENCO UNTERS:

AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF EXTRATERRESTRIALS
AND OTHERWORLDLY BEINGS

A, 1

Abductions by UFOs, 1
Abraham, 7
Abram, 7
Adama, 7

Adamski, George (1891-1965), 8

Aenstrians, 10

Aetherius, 11

Affa, 12

Agents, 13

Agharti, 13

Ahab, 15

Akon, 15

Alien diners, 16

Alien DNA, 17

Aliens and the dead, 18

Allinghams Martian, 19

Alpha Zoo Loo, 19

Alyn, 20

Ameboids, 21

Andolo, 21

Andra-o-leeka and Mondra-o-leeka, 21

Angel of the Dark, 22

Angelucci, Orfeo (1912-1993), 22

Anoah, 23

Anthon, 24

Antron, 24

Anunnaki, 24

Apol, Mr., 25

Arna and Parz, 26

Artemis, 26

Ascended Masters, 27

Ashtar, 27

Asmitor, 29

Athena, 30

Atlantis, 31

Aura Rhanes, 34

Aurora Martian, 34

Ausso, 35

Avinash, 36

Ayala, 36

Azelia, 37

Back, 39

Bartholomew, 39

vii

viii Contents

Bashar, 39

Being of Light, 40

Bermuda Triangle, 41

Bethurum, Truman (1898-1969), 43

Bird aliens, 44

Birmingham’s ark, 44

Blowing Cave, 43

Bonnie, 47

Boys from Topside, 47
Brodies deros, 48
Brown’s Martians, 50
Bucky, 51

Buff Ledge abduction, 52
Bunians, 53
Calf-rustling aliens, 55
Captive extraterrestrials, 57
Cetaceans, 58
Chaneques, 58
Channeling, 59
Chief Joseph, 61
Christopher, 61
Chung Fu, 61

Close encounters of the third kind, 62

Cocoon people, 67

Contactees, 68

Cosmic Awareness, 72

Cottingley fairies, 73

The Council, 75

Curry, 75

Cyclopeans, 76

Cymatrili, 76

David of Landa, 79

Dead extraterrestrials, 81

Dentons’s Martians and Venusians, 87

Diane, 87

Divine Fire, 88

Dual reference, 88

Dugj a, 90

Earth Coincidence Control Office, 91

Elder Race, 92

Elvis as Jesus, 92

Emmanuel, 93

Eunethia, 94

Extraterrestrial biological entities, 94
Extraterrestrials among us, 95
Fairies encountered, 99
Fairy captures, 103
Fossilized aliens, 104

Fourth dimension, 104

Frank and Frances, 105

Fry, Daniel William (1908-1922), 105

Gabriel, 107

Gef, 107

Germane, 111

Goblin Universe, 111

Gordon, 111

Gray Face, 112

Great Mother, 113

Great White Brotherhood, 114

Greater Nibiruan Council, 115

Grim Reaper, 115

Gyeorgos Ceres Hatonn, 117

Hierarchal Board, 119

Holloman aliens, 119

Hollow earth, 121

Honor, 123

Hopkins, Budd (1931- ), 124
Hopkins’s Martians, 125
Hweig, 125
Hybrid beings, 126
Imaginal beings, 129
Insectoids, 130

Intelligences from Beyond (Intelligences
Dehors), 130
Ishkomar, 130
J.W., 133

Jahrmin and Jana, 133

Janus, 134

Jerhoam, 135

Jessup’s “little people,” 135

Jinns, 135

Joseph, 136

Kantarians, 139

Kappa, 139

Karen, 140

Karmic Board, 140

Kazik, 141

Keel, John Alva (1930- ), 142

Khauga, 143

Kihief, 143

King Leo, 144

Korton, 145

Kronin, 145

Kuran, 145

Kurmos, 146

KwanTi Laslo, 146

Contents ix

Laan-Deeka and Sharanna, 149

Lady of Pluto, 150

Land beyond the Pole, 151

Lanello, 153

Laskon, 154

Lazaris, 154

Lemuria, 155

Lethbridge’s aeronauts, 157

Li Sung, 158

Linn-Erri, 158

Luno, 159

Lyrans, 160

Mafu, 161

Magonia, 161

Marian apparitions, 162

Mark, 165

Martian bees, 166

Mary, 166

Meier, Eduard “Billy” (1937- ), 167

Me-leelah, 169

Melora, 170

Men in black, 170

Menger, Howard (1922- ), 172

Merk, 173

Mersch, 173

Metatron, 173

Michael, 174

Michigan giant, 175

Migrants, 175

Mince-Pie Martians, 175

Miniature pilots, 177

Monka, 177

Mothman, 178

Mount Lassen, 179

Mount Shasta, 181

Mr. X, 184

MU the Mantis Being, 184
Muller’s Martians, 185
Noma, 187
Nordics, 187
Nostradamus, 188
Octopus aliens, 191
Ogatta, 191
OINTS, 192
Old Hag, 192
Oleson’s giants, 194
Olliana Olliana Alliano, 195
Orthon, 195

Oxalc, 196
Oz Factor, 197
Paul 2, 199
Philip, 200

Planetary Council, 200
Portia, 201

Power of Light (POL), 201
Prince Neosom, 202
Psychoterrestrials, 203
Puddy’s abduction, 204
R. D„ 207
Ra, 207

Rainbow City, 207
Ramtha, 209
Ramu, 210
Raphael, 211
Raydia, 211
Renata, 211
Reptoid child, 212
Reptoids, 212
Root Races, 216
Saint Michael, 217
Sananda, 217
Sasquatch, 217
Satonians, 220
Secret Chiefs, 220
Semjase, 220
Seth, 221
Shaari, 222
Shan, 222
Shaver mystery, 223
Shaw’s Martians, 226
Sheep-killing alien, 227
Shiva, 227
Shovar, 228

Sinat Schirah (Stan), 228

Sister Thedra, 229

Sky people, 232

Smead’s Martians, 233

Smith, 233

Source, 234

SPECTRA, 234

Springheel Jack, 235

Sprinkle, Ronald Leo (1930- ), 236

Star People, 237

Stellar Community of Enlightened
Ecosystems, 238
Strieber, Whitley (1945- ), 238

x Contents

Sunar and Treena, 239

Tabar, 241

Tawa, 241

Tecu, 241

Thee Elohim, 242

Thompson’s Venusians, 242

Tibus, 244

Time travelers, 244

Tin-can aliens, 245

Tree-stump aliens, 245

Tulpa, 245

The Two, 246

Ulkt, 249

Ultraterrestrials, 249
Ummo, 249
Unholy Six, 252
Vadig, 253
ValThor, 254
Valdar, 255

Van Tassel, George W. (1910-

Vegetable Man, 256

Venudo, 257

Villanueva’s visitors, 257

VIVenus, 258

Volmo, 259

Walk-ins, 261

Walton’s abduction, 261

Wanderers, 266

White Eagle, 266

White’s little people, 266

Wilcox’s Martians, 267

Williamson, George Hunt (1926-1986), 268

Wilson, 270

Xeno, 273

Yada di Shi’ite, 275

Yamski, 275

Y’hova, 276

Zagga, 277

Zandark, 277

1978), 255 Zolton, 277

Index, 279

Introduction

Extraordinary encounters have been reported
for as long as human beings have been
around, and they are richly documented in
the world’s folklore and mythology. A full ac¬
counting of traditions of otherworldly belief
would easily fill many fat volumes. This book,
however, is not about traditions but about ex¬
periences, or perceived experiences, of other¬
worldly forces as claimed by a wide range of
individuals over the past two centuries (with
the rare look farther back if the occasion calls
for it). In other words, it is about things that
people, many of them living, say happened to
them, things far outside mainstream notions
about what it is possible to experience, but, at
the same time, things that seem deeply real to
at least the sincere experients (that is, those
persons who have had the experiences). Not
everyone, of course, is telling the truth, and
when there is reason to be suspicious of the
testimony, that consideration is noted.

Mostly, though, I let the stories tell them¬
selves; I have left my own observations and
conclusions in this introduction. Though
much of the material is outlandish by any def¬
inition, I have made a conscious effort to re¬
late it straightforwardly, and I hope readers
will take it in the same spirit. No single per¬
son on this earth is guiltless of believing some¬
thing that isn’t so. As I wrote this book, I tried

to keep in mind these wise words from scien¬
tist and author Henry H. Bauer: “Foolish
ideas do not make a fool—if they did, we
could all rightly be called fools.”

Most of us believe in at least the hypotheti¬
cal existence of other-than-human beings,
whether we think of them as manifestations of
the divine or as advanced extraterrestrials. At
the same time most of us do not think of
these beings as intelligences we are likely to
encounter in quotidian reality. God and the
angels are in heaven, spiritual entities who
exist as objects of faith. Extraterrestrials,
though not gods, “exist” in much the same
way, as beings who science fiction writers and
scientists such as the late Carl Sagan theorize
may be out there somewhere in deep space,
though so far away that no direct evidence
supports the proposition. When devout indi¬
viduals report feeling the “presence of God,”
they usually describe a subjective state that the
nonbeliever does not feel compelled to take
literally.

Of course we know there was a time when
our ancestors were certain that otherworldly
beings of all sorts walked the world. Gods
communicated openly with humans. One
could summon up their presence or encounter
them spontaneously. Fairies and other super¬
natural entities haunted the landscape as

xii Introduction

things that existed not just in supernatural be¬
lief but in actual experience. We also know
that our poor, benighted ancestors knew no
better. Superstitious, fearful, deeply credu¬
lous, they mistook shadows and dreams for
denizens of realms that had no reality beyond
the one ignorance and foolishness assigned it.

Finally, most of us are aware, even if only
dimly so, that a handful of people in our own
enlightened time make more or less public
claims that they have personally interacted
with supernormal beings. Such persons are
thoroughly marginalized, treated as eccentric
and novel, as different from the rest of us; if
they are not lying outright, we suspect, they
are suffering from a mental disturbance of
some kind. And we may well be right, at least
in some cases. As for the rest, we could not be
more mistaken.

As it happens, reports of human interac¬
tion with ostensible otherworldly beings con¬
tinue pretty much unabated into the present.
They are far more common than one would
think. The proof is as close as an Internet
search, through which the inquirer will
quickly learn that material on the subject ex¬
ists in staggering quantity. A considerable por¬
tion of it is about channeling (in which an in¬
dividual is the passive recipient of messages
from the otherworld, usually speaking in the
voice of an intelligence from elsewhere) from
a wide assortment of entities: nebulous energy
sources, soul clusters, extraterrestrials, as¬
cended masters, interdimensional beings, dis-
carnate Atlanteans and Lemurians, nature
spirits, even whales and dolphins. Besides
these purely psychic connections with the
otherworld, there are many who report direct
physical meetings with beings from outer
space, other dimensions, the hollow earth,
and other fantastic places. Not all of these
ideas are new, of course. The hollow earth and
its inhabitants were a popular fringe subject in
nineteenth-century America, and in the latter
half of that century, spiritualist mediums
sometimes communicated with Martians or
even experienced out-of-body journeys to the
red planet. In 1896 and 1897, during what

today would be called a nationwide wave of
unidentified flying object (UFO) sightings,
American newspapers printed accounts of
landings of strange craft occupied by nonhu¬
man crews of giants, dwarfs, or monsters pre¬
sumed to be visiting extraterrestrials.

But in the UFO age—that is, the period
from 1947 to the present, when reports of
anomalous aerial phenomena became widely
known and their implications much dis¬
cussed—a small army of “contactees,” re¬
counting physical or psychic meetings with
angelic space people, has marched onto the
world stage to preach a new cosmic gospel. In
a secular context, UFO witnesses with no dis¬
cernible occult orientation or metaphysical
agenda have told fantastic tales of close en¬
counters with incommunicative or taciturn
humanoids. Some witnesses even relate, under
hypnosis or through conscious “recall,” trau¬
matic episodes in which humanoids took
them against their will into apparent space¬
craft. The early 1970s, the period when most
observers date the beginning of the New Age
movement, saw a boom in channeling—again
nothing new (spirits have spoken through hu¬
mans forever) but jarring and shocking to ra¬
tionalists and materialists. The same decade
spawned such popular occult fads as the
Bermuda Triangle and ancient astronauts
(prehistoric or early extraterrestrial visitors),
based on the notion of otherworldly influ¬
ences—benign, malevolent, or indifferent—
on human life.

As cable television became ubiquitous, tele¬
vision documentaries or pseudodocumen¬
taries (some, such as a notorious Fox Network
broadcast purporting to show an autopsy per¬
formed on a dead extraterrestrial, were thinly
concealed hoaxes) served to fill programming
needs and proved to be among cable’s most
popular offerings. Books alleging real-life en¬
counters with aliens, such as Whitley
Strieber’s Communion: A True Story (1987),
fueled interest and speculation. In the 1990s
Pulitzer Prize—winning Harvard University
psychiatrist John E. Mack, who had hypno¬
tized a number of persons who thought they

Introduction xiii

may have encountered UFO beings, champi¬
oned the idea—which not surprisingly gener¬
ated furious controversy and even a failed ef¬
fort to have him removed from his job—that
well-intentioned extradimensional intelli¬
gences are helping an unprepared humanity to
enter a new age of spiritual wisdom and eco¬
logical stewardship. Mack, along with other
prominent investigators of the abduction phe¬
nomenon such as Budd Hopkins and David
M. Jacobs, pointed to the results of a 1992
Roper poll as evidence that as many as 3.7
million Americans have been abducted—a
conclusion many critics, including some who
are open-minded about or even sympathetic
to the abduction phenomenon, would dis¬
pute. Still, there seemed no doubt, based on
the experiences of investigators who have
found themselves inundated with reports, that
thousands of otherwise seemingly normal in¬
dividuals believe themselves to be abductees.

The abduction phenomenon is undoubt¬
edly the most recent manifestation of the oth¬
erworldly-beings tradition, but older beliefs
and experiences, though eclipsed, continue.
Even into the 1990s, encounters with fairies—
which extraterrestrial humanoids were sup¬
posed to have supplanted in the imaginations
of the superstitious and impressionable, ac¬
cording to any number of skeptical commen¬
tators—were noted on occasion. At least one
recent book from a reputable publisher—Janet
Bord’s Fairies: Real Encounters with Little Peo¬
ple (1997)—argued that such things are a gen¬
uine aspect of a universe “so complex that we
cannot begin to understand it.” The Blessed
Virgin Mary appeared, as usual, all over the
world, as did other sorts of divine entities.

The world, of course, goes on with its busi¬
ness as if none of this were true, taking serious
(as opposed to tabloid) note only when belief
in otherworldly beings goes horrendously
wrong and thirty-nine cult members commit
suicide while awaiting the arrival of a space¬
ship following a comet. The March 1997
mass death in San Diego of the faithful of
Heavens Gate (a contactee-oriented group
that, in various incarnations, had existed since

the early 1970s) sparked big headlines even in
such august media as the New York Times and
the Washington Post. In the wake of the
tragedy came all the predictable lamentations
about alienation and irrationality in a world
that more and more seems to have lost its
bearings. But the San Diego incident, al¬
though hardly unprecedented (history records
numerous episodes of group suicides commit¬
ted in the name of otherworldly powers), was
anomalous in one important sense: few who
hold such extraordinary beliefs, including the
conviction that they personally interact with
beings from other realms, harm themselves or
others. In fact, most incorporate their experi¬
ences into lives so seemingly ordinary that
their neighbors, unless told directly (which
they usually are not), suspect nothing.

In the late 1970s, when I lived in a North
Shore suburb of Chicago, I met a likable, gen¬
erous-hearted family man named Keith Mac¬
donald. Macdonald recounted a UFO sight¬
ing (also witnessed by his family) after which
he felt that something had taken place that he
could not consciously recall. Under hypnosis,
he described what would later be judged a
rather ordinary abduction experience: gray¬
skinned beings took him into the UFO and
subjected him to a physical examination
against his wishes. The experience, if that is
what it was, frightened him severely. For a
time I lost touch with Keith. When I next saw
him, he told me he had been hearing mental
voices and channeling messages from a planet
called Landa, populated by wise, spiritually
committed beings who looked like Greek
gods and goddesses. Keith had learned that he
was originally from that planet but had gone
through many earthly incarnations so that he
could lead the Earth as it entered a period of
turmoil and destruction before the ships from
Landa arrived to save the elect. Over the years
I monitored Keiths emerging beliefs and sat
in on a few—to me unimpressive—channel¬
ing sessions during which the all-wise David,
his father on Landa, spoke on a level of verbal
and intellectual sophistication that exactly
matched Keith’s.

xiv Introduction

Though I never for a moment believed in
the literal reality of “those of Landa,” as they
called themselves in their characteristically
stilted syntax, I was struck by a number of
things. One was the almost staggering com¬
plexity of the cosmos Keith had conjured up
in his imagination—the only place that I
could believe such a cosmos existed, with its
many worlds, peoples, religions, politics, en¬
mities, and alliances. None of it, I should add,
was anything somebody could not have made
up, consciously or unconsciously. But all of it
would have done credit to a gifted writer of
science fiction. Though he possessed a keen
native intelligence, Keith was neither a writer
nor a reader. He did, however, have some pre¬
viously existing interest—not profound or
particularly well informed, in my observa¬
tion—in UFOs, the paranormal, and the oc¬
cult. As I listened to him over many hours, I
began to feel as if somehow in his waking life
Keith had tapped into the creative potential
most of us experience in our dreams. As we
doze off to sleep and dream, images begin to
well up out of the unconscious; in no more
than a moment we may find ourselves inun¬
dated with psychic materials sufficient to fill a
fat Victorian novel. When our eyes open in
the morning, all of that, alas, is gone. Keith
had the capacity, it seemed to me, not only to
live inside his dreams but to keep them stable
and evolving.

Only once, when asked outright, did I ac¬
knowledge my skepticism. The confession was
moot because Keith had inferred as much from
my noncommittal responses to his typically ex¬
cited revelations about the latest from the Lan-
danians. He had no doubt—well, maybe 98
percent of the time he had no doubt—that he
was in the middle of something real in the
most fundamental sense of the word. He also
understood that he had no proof that would
satisfy those who, like me, found the Landani-
ans’ word insufficient. Therefore, he continu¬
ally implored the Landanians to provide him
that proof, and in turn they regaled him with a
series of prophecies, often about explosive
world events (bloody uprisings, devastating

earthquakes), none of which came true; then,
as if to add insult to injury, their rationaliza¬
tions for the failure of the prophecies to be ful¬
filled bordered on, and sometimes surpassed,
the comical. The prophecies and promises con¬
tinued in a steady stream until Keith’s prema¬
ture death in 1999, and his closest friend told
me that even at the end, Keiths faith had not
faltered.

Perhaps the most amazing aspect was
Keith’s manifest sanity, which he never lost
through the many ups and downs of his inter¬
actions with the Landanians (not to mention
the literally crippling health problems he suf¬
fered at the same time). He worked—as a
garage mechanic in a Waukegan, Illinois, car
dealership—until he was physically incapable
of doing so any longer. He was a good hus¬
band to his wife, a good father to his two
boys, and a good friend to those who were
lucky enough to claim him as a friend in turn.
His children, in their teens at the initiation of
Keith’s adventures with Landa, and his wife
vividly recalled the original UFO sighting
they too had experienced and Keith’s convic¬
tion that, after they had gone to bed and he
had continued watching the object, some¬
thing had happened. Still, they did not believe
much in Landa, and his older son told me
once of his certainty that his father’s commu¬
nications were psychological in origin. Yet
they loved him, and only those very close to
him had any idea that at any given moment a
good portion of Keith’s attention was focused
on a world far, far away from the small subur¬
ban town where he spent much of his adult
life.

In 1985, I flew in a private plane with
Keith and two others (both, incidentally, con¬
vinced of the literal truth of Keith’s messages)
to the Rocky Mountain Conference on UFO
Investigation, held every summer on the cam¬
pus of the University of Wyoming in Laramie.
The title is something of a misnomer; only a
relative few who attend can be called “investi¬
gators.” The emphasis is on experience not
just with UFOs but with the space people
who fly them. The bulk of the attendees—the

Introduction xv

number ranges from a few dozen to as many
as two hundred from year to year—are in reg¬
ular contact with benevolent extraterrestrials.
The aliens communicate through channeling,
automatic writing (in which information is
dictated to an individual from allegedly un¬
earthly beings), dreams, visions, or voices in
the head, or they are perceived as if physical
entities. (I use this last phrase deliberately; on
close questioning, the individuals involved
usually turn out to have a fairly elastic defini¬
tion of the infinitive “to see” in all its permu¬
tations.) Few of the contactees assembled in
Laramie matched the stereotype of the flam¬
boyant charlatan or nut case. A few—such as
a young Japanese woman whom space friends
had guided to the United States in pursuit of
her mission for them—had traveled some dis¬
tance. Except for the small detail of their asso¬
ciations with extraterrestrials, most were de¬
cent, ordinary local folk. The majority were
from the small towns, ranches, and farms of
the Great Plains, the sort of people to whom
the phrase “salt of the earth” is often applied.

Among his own at last, Keith could not
have been happier. If he noticed that no one
else spoke of Landa and its impossible-to-
overlook plans for the Earths future, or that
every other contactee had his or her special
space friends, all with their own individual
hard-to-overlook plans for the Earth’s future,
he never said a word about it to me.

Of course, nothing is as simple as we
would like it to be, and as I look back on the
episode, I realize that I will never know why
“those of Landa” called on Keith. Not that I
had any difficulty understanding who they
were. However tangled some of the details,
there was no mistaking their underlying ba¬
nality or their all-too-apparent shallow earth¬
iness, with their Greek togas, pretentiously
fractured English, and (yes) Roman Catholic
faith. They themselves were not that interest¬
ing; what made them worthy of attention and
reflection was this curious paradox: to the
man who had (unwittingly) created them,
they had a nearly certain independent reality;
to virtually any independent observer, there

could be no question of who had brought
them (for whatever reason) into the world
and to whom they owed what passed for an
existence.

Yet Keith was not crazy. Nor, according to
psychological surveys of other space commu¬
nicants who attend the Laramie conferences,
are his fellows. The evidence from this and
other psychological inventories tells us that we
can be mentally well and yet hold beliefs—
and, more dramatically, have vivid experi¬
ences—that are far outside the mainstream,
far outside our conventional understanding of
the possible. In a book-length survey of out-
of-ordinary perceptions, three well-regarded
psychologists observe, “Notwithstanding the
presence of anomalous experiences in case
studies of disturbed individuals, surveys of
nonclinical samples have found little relation¬
ship between these experiences and psy¬
chopathology” (Cardena, Lynn, and Krippner,
2000, 4). The authors stress that psychothera¬
pists must understand the difference if they
are to treat their clients effectively. Psychologi¬
cal research into extraordinary encounters of
the sort with which this book is concerned is
in its infancy.

Still, to anyone who looks carefully at the
testimony regarding otherworldly contacts, it
becomes apparent that such phenomena do
not arise from a single cause. There is, for ex¬
ample, little in common between the average
channeler and the average witness to a close
encounter of the third kind (a UFO sighting
in which, according to a classification system
defined by the late astronomer and ufologist J.
Allen Hynek, “the presence of animated crea¬
tures is reported” [1972, 138]). Typically,
channelers have had a long history of occult
interests before they begin communicating
with supernatural entities holding forth on fa¬
miliar metaphysical doctrines. Close-encoun¬
ter witnesses, on the other hand, fit the profile
of witnesses to less exotic UFO sightings; in
other words, they are pretty much indistin¬
guishable from their fellow citizens.

Consequently, channelers look more like
candidates for subjective experience, and in-

xvi Introduction

deed to every indication channeling is just
that. It is not veridical (that is, independently
witnessed or otherwise shown not to be a sub¬
jective experience); no channeling entity can
prove its existence, and the information pro¬
vided through the channeling process is sus¬
ceptible to neither verification nor falsifica¬
tion. The “authority” of the channeling entity
rests solely on its self-identification. If you be¬
lieve he, she, or it is a discarnate Atlantean,
space alien, or ascended master, you will be¬
lieve what he, she, or it has to say. If you
choose not to believe any of that, the channel¬
ing entity will prove helpless to get you to
change your mind. Experiences such as close
encounters, conversely, may be veridical in the
sense that on occasion they involve multi¬
ple—or, more rarely, independent—observ¬
ers. In the case of multiply witnessed close en¬
counters, subjective explanations are applied
only with difficulty. An investigator in search
of an explanation has limited choices, usually
three: (1) the claimants made up the story; (2)
they naively misperceived what were in fact
conventional stimuli; or (3) they underwent
an extraordinary experience that defies current
understanding.

Between the extremes is a broad range of
nonexperiential material, a modern folklore in
which the world and the cosmos are rein¬
vented on the basis of believed-in but undoc¬
umented (and often, to those who care about
such things, certifiably false) allegations. Most
persons who circulate such stuff are sincere,
but some of those who feed the stuff to them
are not. Hoaxers provide documents, such as
the supposed diary attesting to Adm. Richard
E. Byrd’s voyage into the hollow earth
through a hole at the North Pole, that believ¬
ers cite to prove their cases. Most observers
believe James Churchward’s famous (or noto¬
rious) books on the alleged lost continent of
Mu are literary hoaxes—Churchward was
never able to produce the ancient documents
on which he asserted he had based his work—
but earnest occultists and New Agers cite his
books as overwhelming evidence that Mu

(more often called Lemuria) was a real place.
Of course, embellishments grow on top of
embellishments, and every legend of a place, a
world, or a realm that is home to otherworldly
beings evolves and has its own rich history.
Atlantis, for example, began as an advanced
civilization for its time, but by our time its
people had come to be seen as advanced even
beyond us, the creators of fantastic technolo¬
gies and even the recipient of knowledge from
extraterrestrial sources. The hollow earth of
John Cleves Symmes (1779-1829) is not the
hollow earth of Walter Siegmeister (a.k.a.
Raymond W. Bernard, 1901-1965), any
more than the imagination of one century is
the imagination of the century that follows it.
Flying saucers were not part of Symmes’s
world; consequently, they did not exist in his
hollow earth. By the time Siegmeister wrote
The Holloiv Earth (1964), no alternative-real¬
ity book could lack flying saucers.

It is entirely likely that nothing in the book
you are about to read will tell you anything
about actual extraordinary encounters and
otherworldly beings. If such exist, however, it
is not beyond the range of possibility that
somewhere amid the noise of folklore, belief,
superstition, credulity, out-of-control think¬
ing, and out-of-ordinary perception a signal
may be sounding. If so, it is a faint one, in¬
deed. The world has always been overrun with
otherworldly experiences, some of which cer¬
tainly appear to resist glib accounting; yet so
far it has proved exasperatingly tricky to estab¬
lish that otherworldly experiences are also oth¬
erworldly events. The otherworld, perhaps,
can happen to any of us at any time, but we
may not live in it—at least if we know what’s
good for us—in the way that we live enclosed
within the four walls of the physical structure
in which we read these words. It is not wise to
pass through a world of physical laws while
distracted by all-encompassing dreams. Even
so, there is still a nobility to dreaming. There is
also an undying appeal to the sort of romantic
impatience that imagines new worlds bigger
and more wondrous than our own, then

Introduction xvii

brings these worlds and their marvelous inhab¬
itants into our own. If extraordinary encoun¬
ters are occurring only with otherwise hidden
sides of ourselves, they are still—or surely all
the more so—worth having.

—Jerome Clark

References

Cardena, Etzel, Steven Jay Lynn, and Stanley Kripp-
ner, eds., 2000. Varieties of Anomalous Experience:
Examining the Scientific Evidence. Washington,
DC: American Psychological Association.

Hynek, J. Allen, 1972. The UFO Experience: A Scien¬
tific Inquiry, p.138. Chicago: Henry Regnery
Company.

EXTRAORDINARY

ENCOUNTERS

“A” is the pseudonym Ann Grevler (a writer
who uses the pen name “Anchor”) gives the
Venusian whom she allegedly encountered
while driving through South Africa’s Eastern
Transvaal on an unspecified day in the 1950s.
Grevler, a flying-saucer enthusiast sympathetic
to the contactee movement (contactees are in¬
dividuals who claim to be in regular communi¬
cation with kindly, advanced extraterrestrials),
met A when her car inexplicably stopped on a
rural highway As she was looking under the
hood, she became aware of a buzzing sound in
her ears and looked up to see a smiling space¬
man standing not far away. Then a spaceship
flew toward her and landed, and she and A
stepped into it. With A and another spaceman,
B, Grevler flew into space. They approached
what Grevler describes as “a positively huge
Mother Ship,” which tinier ships, similar to the
one they were aboard, were entering.

Once inside the mother ship, Grevler and
her friends went to “the Temple, visited by re¬
turning crews to thank the Creator for a safe
voyage.” Subsequently, either in the mother
ship or in the smaller scout craft (her account
is vague on this detail), she visited Venus and
saw beautiful buildings and a kind of univer¬
sity. At the latter, students were taught univer¬
sal knowledge and trained in extrasensory per¬

ception. They also learned “Cosmic Lan¬
guage—which is expressed simply by symbols
of various forms and colors, so that meanings
are the same in any language” (Anchor, 1958).

Grevler had other space adventures. One
was a visit to a depopulated, destroyed planet,
the dreary result of science gone amok.

See Also: Contactees

Further Reading

Anchor [pseud, of Ann Grevler], 1958. Transvaal
Episode: A UFO Lands in Africa. Corpus Christi,
TX: Essene Press.

Abductions by UFOs

Since the mid-1960s a number of individuals
around the world have reported encounters in
which humanoid beings took them against
their will—usually from their homes or vehi¬
cles—into apparent spacecraft and subjected
them to medical and other procedures. As
often as not, witnesses spoke of experiencing
amnesia, aware at first only of unexplained
“missing time” (a much-used phrase that has
become almost synonymous with abduction)
consisting of a few minutes to a few hours.
Later, “memory” would return, sometimes
spontaneously, sometimes in dreams, and
often (and most controversially) through hyp¬
notic regression.

2 Abductions by UFOs

In the first case to come to the attention of
ufologists, a Portsmouth, New Hampshire,
couple, Barney and Betty Hill, experienced a
close encounter with a UFO on the night of
September 19-20 while traveling through the
White Mountains. At one point, Barney Hill
stopped the car and stepped out with a pair of
binoculars; through them he saw humanlike
figures inside the craft. One was staring di¬
rectly at him. Terrified, the couple fled, all the
while hearing beeping or buzzing sounds.
Once back home, the Hills eventually realized
that at least two hours seemed missing from
their conscious recall. In November Betty had
a series of unusually vivid dreams in which be¬
ings forced her and her husband into a UFO.
She and Barney were separated, and Betty un¬
derwent a medical examination with a gray¬
skinned humanoid, whom she understood to
be the leader. In January they sought out
Boston psychiatrist Benjamin Simon in an ef¬
fort to deal with the continuing anxiety they
felt about the incident. Dr. Simon had them
hypnotized, and under hypnosis they sepa¬
rately recounted an abduction episode. Subse¬
quently, the story appeared in a Boston news¬
paper, and soon afterward journalist John G.
Fuller wrote a best-selling book, The Inter -
ruptedJourney, on the case.

A generally similar incident took place in
Ashland, Nebraska, in the early morning
hours of December 3, 1967, when police offi¬
cer Herbert Schirmer saw a hovering UFO a
short distance from him. He originally be¬
lieved that the sighting had lasted no more
than ten minutes, but when he later realized
that a half hour had passed, he got nervous,
experienced sleeplessness, and heard a buzzing
sound inside his head. Later under hypnosis
Schirmer related an onboard experience with
short, gray-skinned humanoids with catlike
eyes.

During a wave of UFO sightings in Octo¬
ber 1973, two Pascagoula, Mississippi, fisher¬
men claimed that robotlike entities had
floated them into a UFO. The story received
enormous publicity, as did an even more spec¬
tacular incident in November 1975, when a

forestry worker from Snowflake, Arizona, dis¬
appeared after six colleagues saw a beam of
light from a UFO hit him and knock him to
the ground. Travis Walton returned five days
later with fragmentary memories of seeing
two kinds of UFO beings, little gray men and
humanlike (but not human) entities. A few
other stories, now being called “abductions” as
opposed to “kidnappings,” saw print in the
UFO literature but were little noticed else¬
where. The first book on the larger phenome¬
non of UFO abductions (as opposed to a
single case, such as the Hills’s), Jim and Coral
Lorenzen’s book Abducted! was published in
1977.

From the Hill incident on, critics focused
on the use of hypnosis to elicit “recall,”
pointing out that confabulation under hyp¬
nosis is a well-documented psychological
phenomenon, most dramatically manifesting
in “memories” of past lives. As early as 1977
three California investigators attempted to
demonstrate that volunteers under hypnosis,
instructed to imagine UFO abductions, told
stories indistinguishable from those related
by “real” abductees. Other investigators and
observers disputed these conclusions, point¬
ing to methodological and logical problems
in the experiment, and subsequent efforts by
other researchers to replicate it failed. One
later study indicated that nearly one-third of
abductees consciously remembered their ex¬
periences; their testimony, folklorist Thomas
E. Bullard concluded, was indistinguishable
from corresponding accounts emerging under
hypnotic regression. Still, hypnosis and its va¬
garies would play a large and continuing role
in the controversy surrounding the abduction
phenomenon.

In the late 1970s Budd Hopkins, a New
York City artist and sculptor, working with
psychologist and hypnotist Aphrodite Clamar,
began to investigate the abduction reports.
Through Hopkins’s work new dimensions of
the phenomenon emerged, including not just
little gray humanoids that would come to
dominate abduction reports but also experi¬
ences that began in childhood and recurred

Abductions by UFOs 3

Betty and Barney Hill, who believed they were abducted and taken aboard a UFO, New Hampshire, September 1961
(Fortean Picture Library)

throughout abductees’ lifetimes. Some bore
scars, the causes of which were mysterious
until hypnosis revealed them to have been the
result of alien medical procedures. A number
claimed that their abductors had placed im¬
plants, usually through the nose or ear, inside
their bodies. Hopkins and his colleagues took
their cases to mental health professionals,
whose tests of abductees suggested that they
were psychologically normal.

In his much-read book Missing Time
(1981) Hopkins argued for a literal interpreta¬

tion of abduction stories. In other words, he
held that extraterrestrials were literally taking
human beings and doing things to them with¬
out their consent. Other ufologists disagreed.
Ufologist Alvin H. Lawson, who had overseen
the earlier “imaginary-abduction” experiment,
offered his own exotic hypothesis that ab¬
ductees were suffering imaginary experiences
in which they relived the “trauma” associated
with their births. More modestly, others pro¬
posed more conventional psychological expla¬
nations, such as hallucinations and confabula-

4 Abductions by UFOs

tion. Few observers believed that conscious
hoaxing played much of a role in abduction¬
reporting. Unlike contactees, abductees sel¬
dom had any background in occultism or eso¬
teric interests, and hardly any sought profit or
publicity. To every indication they believed
that they had undergone frightening, bizarre
experiences. Some psychological studies
found that abductees often evinced all the
symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder of
the sort ordinarily associated with victims of
crime, personal assault, or other threatening
terrors.

In 1987 Thomas E. Bullard, author of an
Indiana University Ph.D. dissertation on the
relationship of UFOs to folklore, released a
two-volume study of all abduction accounts
then known, some three hundred. Through a
searching examination of the narratives,
Bullard concluded that a real phenomenon of
strikingly consistent features existed, that “ab¬
ductions” were not simply an assortment of
random fantasies. He noted patterns that had
escaped even the most attentive investigators,
including “doorway amnesia”—the curious
failure of abductees to remember the moment
of entry or departure from the UFO. Besides
establishing the uniform nature of hypnotic
and non-hypnotic testimony, Bullard deter¬
mined that the phenomenon’s features re¬
mained stable from investigator to investiga¬
tor, thus casting doubt on a favorite skeptical
argument concerning investigator influence
on the story. Beyond that, Bullard wrote, it
was difficult to say more, except that “some¬
thing goes on, a marvelous phenomenon rich
enough to interest a host of scholars, human¬
ists, psychologists and sociologists alike as well
as perhaps physical scientists, and to hold that
interest irrespective of the actual nature of the
phenomenon” (Bullard, 1987).

Hopkins’s next book, Intruders (1987), in¬
troduced fresh features that would figure
largely in all subsequent discussions. From his
latest investigations he had come to suspect a
reason for alien abductions: the creation of a
race of hybrid beings to replenish the extrater¬
restrials’ apparently exhausted genetic stock.

Female abductees would find themselves preg¬
nant, sometimes inexplicably; then, following
subsequent abductions involving vaginal pen¬
etration by a suction device, they would dis¬
cover that those pregnancies had been sud¬
denly terminated. In later abductions they
would be shown babies or small children with
both human and alien features. The abductors
would explain that these were the women’s
children. Hopkins also uncovered a pattern of
cases of sexual intercourse between male ab¬
ductees and more-or-less human alien women
(perhaps adult hybrids).

Other investigators began finding similar
cases. Hybrids were a new wrinkle, signifi¬
cantly augmenting the already considerable
peculiarity of the abduction phenomenon. As
long ago as 1975, in his book The Mothman
Prophecies, investigator John A. Keel noted, in
passing, a pattern of what he called “hysterical
pregnancies” in young women who had had
close encounters. Even so, the reports met
with skepticism among scientifically sophisti¬
cated ufologists, for example, Michael D.
Swords, who said that such hybridization is
biologically impossible. Other critics argued
that mass abductions for such purposes would
not be necessary; once the basic reproductive
materials were collected, they could easily be
duplicated. Most damning of all, independent
inquiries by physician-ufologists found no ev¬
idence of mysteriously ended pregnancies in
colleagues’ experiences or in the pediatric lit¬
erature. Still the reports continue.

Another significant development in 1987
was the publication of Communion by Whit¬
ley Strieber, heretofore known as a novelist
specializing in horror and futuristic themes,
now a self-identified abductee with a series of
strange adventures in his past. The gray¬
skinned, big-eyed alien on the best-selling
book’s cover triggered a flood of “memories”
among many who saw it. Even ufologists who
had been abduction literalists grew puzzled,
then uneasy, at the apparent quantity of re¬
covered abduction recollections. Strieber also
was the first to express a kind of New Age
view of the abduction phenomenon, now seen

Abductions by UFOs 5

not as an entirely negative experience (as
Hopkins and others held it to be) but as an
initiation, however painful, into an expanded,
enlightened view of large cosmic realities.
What to Hopkins were “intruders” to Strieber
were “visitors.” Communion was only the first
of a series of books Strieber would write re¬
counting ever more exotic experiences with
aliens possessing vast paranormal powers.

By now UFO abductions were no longer
the property of abductees and ufologists. They
had expanded into popular culture, and the
gray alien became a staple in cartoons, adver¬
tisements, television shows, and more.
Alarmed at the spread of what they regarded
as a popular delusion, skeptics and debunkers
sought to discredit the phenomenon. In 1988
the first book-length attack on the phenome¬
non, its claimants, and its advocates, Philip J.
Klass’s UFO-Abductions: A Dangerous Game,
lambasted its subject as the product of delu¬
sion and deceit.

Though the phenomenon itself remained
elusive, psychologists understood that at least
those who claimed to have experienced it
could be studied. Using standard psychologi¬
cal tests, they documented the essential psy¬
chological normality of the average abductee.
They also found that, contrary to one popular
theory, abductees were not prone to fantasy or
imaginative flights so intense that they could
be mistaken for reality. Little if anything
seemed to distinguish abductees from their
neighbors.

The phenomenon’s most notable cham¬
pion, Harvard University psychiatrist John E.
Mack, became a lightning rod in the contro¬
versy. To his colleagues, who went so far as to
try to have him removed from his professional
position, he was a good scholar gone bad. To
New Age-oriented saucerians on the other
hand, Mack was almost something of a
prophet. His controversial book Abduction
(1994) argued for a benevolent interpretation
of abducting aliens, paranormal and interdi-
mensional intelligences who, in Mack’s view,
are here to teach us—particularly those of us
who live in the industrial West—to embrace

Dr. John E. Mack, Harvard University psychiatrist, 1993
(Dennis Stacy/Fortean Picttire Library)

other realities and to take better care of each
other and the world we live in. Mack wedded
the contactee message to the abduction expe¬
rience, to the consternation of Hopkins, Ja¬
cobs, and others who refused to draw larger
metaphysical inferences from the abduction
experience. Jacobs, if anything, went to the
opposite extreme. A history professor at Tem¬
ple University, Jacobs worked with abductees
whose testimony, usually under hypnosis, led
him to the radical hypothesis that the abduct¬
ing extraterrestrials are creating a population
of hybrids to replace the human race at some
point in the not-distant future.

From their interactions with their readers
and other members of the public, Hopkins and
Jacobs came to suspect that the abduction ex¬
perience, far from rare, was ubiquitous. Hop¬
kins, for example, wrote as early as 1981 that
there may be “tens of thousands of Americans
whose encounters have never been revealed”
(Hopkins, 1981). In 1991 he and Jacobs were
given funding for a survey to be conducted by

6 Abductions by UFOs

the Roper Organization. Using five “indicator”
questions, they sought evidence for possible ab¬
duction experiences among those surveyed.
Pollsters interviewed 5,947 adult Americans. In
their reading of the results, Hopkins and Jacobs
deduced that “the incidence of abduction expe¬
riences appears to be on the order of at least
2% of the population” (Unusual Personal Expe -
riences, 1992). That comes to 3.7 million ab-
ductees. Critics rejected this assertion, arguing
that the study contained too many method¬
ological flaws to mean much. Three social sci¬
entists, all with backgrounds in ufology, exam¬
ined the poll and came to a wholly different
conclusion: “For the present we have no reli¬
able and valid estimate of the prevalence of the
UFO abduction phenomenon” (Hall, Rodeg-
hier, and Johnson, 1992).

In a study of the various theories advanced
to explain UFO abductions, psychologist Stu¬
art Appelle observed that all testable, more or
less conventional hypotheses (confabulation,
fantasy proneness, false memory, sleep halluci¬
nation, and the like) stand on shaky empirical
ground. On the other hand, literalistic inter¬
pretations suffer from an absence of anything
like solid, veridical evidence. All that can be
said with certainty is that abduction experi¬
ences have the feeling of reality to those who
undergo them. Most do not fall into an easily
identifiable psychological category. They ap¬
pear to be reasonably consistent in their core
features, and some cases involve multiple wit¬
nesses. These last cases, in Appelle’s view,
“may provide the greatest challenge to prosaic
explanations” (Appelle, 1995/1996).

See Also: Alien DNA; Aliens and the dead; Cocoon
people; Contactees; Dual reference; Gray Face;
Hopkins, Budd; Hybrid beings; Insectoids; Keel,
John A.; MU the Mantis Being; Nordics; Puddys
abduction; Reptoids; Strieber, Whitley; Walton’s
abduction

Further Reading

Appelle, Stuart, 1995/1996. “The Abduction Expe¬
rience: A Critical Evaluation of Theory and Evi¬
dence.” Journal of UFO Studies 6 (new series):
29-78.

Appelle, Stuart, Steven Jay Lynn, and Leonard New¬
man, 2000. “Alien Abduction Experiences.” In

Etzel Cardena, Steven Jay Lynn, and Stanley
Krippner, eds. Varieties of Anomalous Experience:
Examining the Scientific Evidence, 253-282. Wash¬
ington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Bullard, Thomas E., 1987. UFO Abductions: The
Measure of a Mystery. Volume 1: Comparative Study
of Abduction Reports. Volume 2: Catalogue of Cases.
Mount Rainier, MD: Fund for UFO Research.

-, 1989. “Hypnosis and UFO Abductions: A

Troubled Relationship.” Jottrnal of UFO Studies 1
(new series): 3-40.

-, 1991. “Folkloric Dimensions of the UFO

Phenomenon .’’Journal of UFO Studies 3 (new se¬
ries): 1-57.

-, 2000. “Abductions under Fire: A Review of

Recent Abduction Literature.” Journal of UFO
Studiesl (new series): 81-106.

Clark, Jerome, 2000. “From Mermaids to Little Gray
Men: The Prehistory of the UFO Abduction Phe¬
nomenon.” TheAnomalist 8 (Spring): 11-31.

Fuller, John G., 1966. The Interrupted Journey: Two
Lost Hours “Aboard a Flying Saucer. ” New York:
Dial Press.

Hall, Robert L., Mark Rodeghier, and Donald A.
Johnson, 1992. “The Prevalence of Abductions:
A Critical Look.” Journal of UFO Studies 4 (new
series): 131-135.

Hopkins, Budd, 1981. Missing Time: A Documented
Study of UFO Abductions. New York: Richard
Marek Publishers.

-, 1987. Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at

Copley Woods. New York: Random House.

Jacobs, David M., 1992. Secret Life: Firsthand Ac -
counts of UFO Abductions. New York: Simon and
Schuster.

-, 1998. The Threat. New York: Simon and

Schuster.

Keel, John A., 1975. The Mothman Prophecies. New
York: Saturday Review Press/E. P. Dutton and
Company.

Klass, Philip J., 1988. UFO-Abductions: A Dangerous
Game. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.

Lawson, Alvin H., 1980. “Hypnosis of Imaginary
Abductees’.” In Curtis G. Fuller, ed. Proceedings
of the First Lnternational UFO Congress, 195-238.
New York: Warner Books.

Lorenzen, Jim, and Coral Lorenzen, 1977. Abducted!
Confrontations with Beings from Outer Space. New
York: Berkley Medallion.

Mack, John E., 1994. Abduction: Human Encounters
with Aliens. New York: Charles Scribners Sons.

Strieber, Whitley, 1987. Communion: A True Story.
New York: Beach Tree/William Morrow.

Swords, Michael D., 1988. “Extraterrestrial Hy¬
bridization Unlikely.” MUFON UFO Journal 247:
6 - 10 .

Adama 7

Unusual Personal Experiences: An Analysis of the Data
from Three National Surveys Condticted by the
Roper Organization, 1992. Las Vegas, NV:
Bigelow Holding Corporation.

Abraham

Channeler Esther Hicks heard from abraham
in the early 1980s. She renders the name in
lowercase because abraham is not an individ¬
ual but a collection of highly evolved entities
speaking in one voice. In 1986 she and her
husband, Jerry, confided their experiences
with abraham to business associates, who
soon were peppering them with financial and
personal questions they wanted abraham to
answer. When the Hickses saw how satisfied
their friends were with the results, they de¬
cided to take abraham to a larger public.
Today the couple conduct workshops, put out
a newsletter, and lecture widely out of their
San Antonio, Texas, headquarters.

Abraham teaches that each of us is a physi¬
cal extension of an essence that begins in the
spiritual realm. Each is here because he or she
has chosen to be so, and we are here to exer¬
cise freedom and experience joy. The universe
is benevolent, and it gives us the potential to
realize all of our dreams. There is no such
thing as death; all of us live forever.

Further Reading

Melton, J. Gordon, 1996. Encyclopedia of American
Religions. Detroit, MI: Gale Research.

“A Synopsis of Abraham-Hicks’s Teachings.” http://
www.abraham-hicks.com/bio.html.

Abram

Folklorist Peter M. Rojcewicz relates the expe¬
riences of a young university student to whom
he gives the pseudonym Polly Bromberger. In
the early 1980s Bromberger conjured up a
spirit guide—a “personal archetype,” she
sometimes called it—and gave it the name
Abram. With long, unkempt hair and wearing
a white robe and sandals, Abram looked “bib¬
lical.” He came more clearly into focus after
Bromberger had undergone a period of medi¬
tation and reflection.

A student of the great psychologist and
philosopher C. G. Jung, Bromberger used a
process she learned from Jung's writings—
“active imagination”—to bring Abram into
her life. In time she came to feel that he had a
kind of independent existence. She told Roj¬
cewicz that “sometimes I feel he can be a force
opening me on purpose to make me stretch
myself, and work myself, and sometimes I get
frustrated with it.” On the whole, however,
she was convinced that Abram was a positive
influence in her life.

Further Reading

Rojcewicz, Peter M., 1984. The Boundaries of Ortho -
doxy: A Folkloric Look at the UFO Phenomenon.
Ph.D. dissertation. University of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia.

Adama

Adama, who channels through Dianne Rob¬
bins, is an Ascended Master and High Priest
ofTelos, the great Lemurian city now located
under Mount Shasta in northern California.
Because of his pure thoughts, Adama, like the
million other persons who live in the city, is
able to live for hundreds of years. He is cur¬
rently more than six hundred years old. He is
a descendant of the Lemurians who fled inside
the mountain when Lemuria and all else on
Earths surface were destroyed in a nuclear
holocaust. Only twenty-five thousand Lemu¬
rians escaped in time.

Since then the Lemurians’ consciousness
has evolved significantly. Besides attending to
their spiritual betterment, the Lemurians
have fought off marauding extraterrestrials
who are causing harm to surface dwellers.
“We are all part of God’s grand plan for the
Universe,” Adama says, “and WE ARE NOW
MERGING OUR THOUGHTS INTO ONE
THOUGHT FOR THE ENTIRE HUMAN
RACE. Soon we will all be on the same wave
band of consciousness, broadcasting our love
and light to all in the cosmos and letting the
cosmos know that we are ready to join with
them in one grand FEDERATION OF PLAN¬
ETS” (“Adama,” 1995).

8 Adamski, George

Further Reading

“Adama,” 1995- http://www.salemctr.com/newage/
center36.html.

Adamski, George (1891-1965)

Though largely forgotten today, George
Adamski was once an international occult
celebrity, perhaps the most famous of all fly¬
ing-saucer contactees. His claimed meeting
with a Venusian in the California desert in
November 1952 electrified esoterically in¬
clined saucer buffs. In three books published
between 1953 and 1961 he recounted his
trips into space along with extensive encoun¬
ters with benevolent Venusians, Martians, and
Saturnians. In 1962 he boarded a spaceship
and flew to Saturn to attend an interplanetary
conference. By 1965, when he died, many of
his most devoted followers had broken their
connection with him, convinced either that
he was lying or that evil space people were
misleading him.

Born in Poland, Adamski emigrated with
his parents to upstate New York when he was
one or two years old. In the early 1920s he
moved to California, where he eventually es¬
tablished a role for himself on the local oc¬
cult scene as head of the Royal Order of
Tibet, a metaphysical school based on chan¬
neled teachings from Tibetan lamas. When
flying saucers became an object of popular
interest in the late 1940s, Adamski produced
photographs of alleged spacecraft; some of
the pictures were said to have been taken
through his six-inch telescope. Published in
the popular occult and paranormal digest
Fate in 1950 and 1951, the photos along
with accompanying text afforded Adamski
his first wide exposure. On November 20,
1952, as six others (including contactee and
fringe archaeologist George Hunt William¬
son) watched from a distance, Adamski ob¬
served the landing of a saucer and the emer¬
gence of the beautiful, blond-haired Orthon,
a visitor from Venus, who expressed concern
about the human race’s warlike ways. (In

later years Adamski would tell confidants
that his first contacts with extraterrestrials
occurred in his childhood, but he never said
as much publicly.) Three weeks later Orthon
returned in his scout craft over Adamski’s
Palomar Gardens residence and allowed the
ship to be photographed. The resulting pic¬
tures would generate enormous controversy
and, for many, virtually define the image of a
flying saucer as a domed disc with a three-
ball landing gear.

A fifty-four-page account of Adamski’s
early contacts was added to an already existing
manuscript (on supposed space visitations
throughout history) by Irish occultist
Desmond Leslie and published in 1953 as Fly -
ing Saucers Have Landed. Two years later, in
Inside the Space Ships, Adamski expanded his
claims to encompass further interactions with
extraterrestrials, both on Earth and aboard
saucers. According to Adamski, the “Space
Brothers,” as he called them, had come to
help the human race out of its backward, vio¬
lent ways, which were leading inexorably to
nuclear war. They espoused a benign occult
philosophy much like the one Adamski had
taught for many years.

Though revered by many, Adamski also
had bitter critics, none more so than conser¬
vative ufologists who dismissed his stories as
absurd and feared that he was bringing
ridicule to all of UFO research. Some ufolo¬
gists actively investigated his claims and un¬
covered discrepancies and other evidence of
untruthfulness. One found, for example, that
the weather on a particular day on which
Adamski claimed contact was not as he had
described it. Most photo analysts concluded
that the pictures of “spacecraft” were in fact of
small models. On one occasion skeptical ufol¬
ogists proved that one Adamski allegation was
unambiguously false. Adamski had reported
that as he was traveling to Iowa to give a lec¬
ture, the train suddenly stopped en route.
When he stepped out to take a short walk,
space people met him and flew him to his des¬
tination. From interviews with the train crew,
investigators learned that the train had made

Adamski, George 9

UFO contactee George Adamski with his six-inch telescope on Mount Palomar, California (Fortean Picture Library)

no such stop. In these circumstances Adamski
tended to blame his accusers of being agents
of a sinister “Silence Group” trying to destroy
the space people’s good works. But in later
years, following his death, several individuals

disclosed that Adamski had acknowledged to
them that his stories were not true.

By 1959 Adamski’s renown was such that
he was able to embark on a worldwide tour,
first to New Zealand and Australia, then to

10 Aenstrians

Europe. In May of that same year, Queen Ju¬
liana of Holland received him, igniting fierce
commentary in the press and a riot at the
University of Zurich when Adamski
attempted to give a lecture in Switzerland.
Adamski charged that the students—and in¬
deed most of his critics—were agents of a sin¬
ister Silence Group, which sought to frustrate
the moral reforms and technological advances
advocated by the space people and their ter¬
restrial allies. Though the reality of Adamski’s
audience with Queen Juliana was never in
doubt, other purported meetings with nota¬
bles, including President John F. Kennedy,
Pope John XXIII, and Vice President Hubert
H. Humphrey, that figure in the Adamski leg¬
end almost certainly did not occur outside
Adamski’s imagination.

In the early 1960s, after Adamski openly
embraced psychic approaches of which he
had, till then, been outspokenly critical, some
of his followers started to question his sincer¬
ity, especially when he began doing psychic
consultations for profit. His associate C. A.
Honey circulated damning evidence that
Adamski was recycling his 1930s-era Tibetan-
masters teachings and putting them in the
mouths of space people. When Adamski
claimed that he had flown to Saturn, the story
only fueled growing doubts even among de¬
voted followers.

His career in decline, his credibility never
lower, Adamski went on a final lecture tour
through New York and Rhode Island in
March 1965. For the preceding month, his fi¬
nancial resources exhausted, he had been liv¬
ing with Nelson and Madeleine Rodeffer in
Maryland. He died of a heart attack at their
home on the evening of April 23.

See Also: Contactees; Orthon; Ramu; Williamson,
George Hunt; Yamski

Further Reading

Adamski, George, 1955. Inside the Space Ships. New
York: Abelard-Schuman.

-, 1961. Flying Saucers Farewell. New York:

Abelard-Schuman.

-, 1962. Special Report: My Trip to the Twelve

Counsellors Meeting That Took Place on Saturn,
March 27—30th, 1962. Vista, CA: Science of Life.

Bennett, Colin, 2000. “Breakout of the Fictions:
George Adamski s 1959 World Tour.” The Anom -
alist% (Spring): 39-84.

Ellwood, Robert S., 1995. “Spiritualism and UFO
Religion in New Zealand: The International
Transmission of Modern Spiritual Movements.”
In James R. Lewis, ed. The Gods Have Landed:
New Religions from Other Worlds, 167-186. Al¬
bany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Good, Timothy, 1998. Alien Base: Earth’s Encounters
with Extraterrestrials. London: Century.

Heiden, Richard W, 1984. Review of Zinsstag and
Goods George Adamski—The Untold Story. The
A.P.R.O. Bulletin 32, 5 (August): 4-5.

Leslie, Desmond, and George Adamski, 1953. Flying
Saucers Have Landed. New York: British Book
Centre.

Moseley, James W., ed., 1957. Special Adamski Ex -
pose Issue. Saucer News 27 (October).

Zinsstag, Lou, 1990. UFO... George Adamski:
Their Man on Earth. Tucson, AZ: UFO Photo
Archives.

Zinsstag, Lou, and Timothy Good, 1983. George
Adamski—The Untold Story. Beckenham, Kent,
England: Ceti Publications.

Aenstrians

For a rime in the mid to late 1960s, Warmin¬
ster, Wiltshire, was the focus of a series of mys¬
terious sightings of UFOs and hearings of ap-
parendy related sounds. The excitement
produced what was called the “Warminster
mystery,” which was also the title of a popular
book by Arthur Shuttlewood, a reporter for the
Warminster Journal. Shuttlewood, who led sky
watches and became the leading publicist of
the phenomena, also reported receiving phone
calls from self-identified extraterrestrials, as well
as a personal visit from one. The aliens said
they were from a planet named Aenstria.

The first calls came in early September
1965. The calls continued for a period of
seven weeks, according to Shuttlewood. The
callers were three Aenstrians: Caellsan (the
senior spacecraft commander), Selorik (an in¬
terpreter), and Traellison (the queen of Aens¬
tria). In each case they phoned from a public
booth in a particular district in the city,
though Shuttlewood wrote that he never
heard the sound of coins dropping before the
voices began to speak.

Aetherius 11

The messages were standard contactee fare.
Earth is in trouble because of atomic weapons
and environmental pollution. Human beings—
the product of special creation, not evolutionary
processes—should return to simpler, more spiri¬
tual ways. The Aenstrians lived long lives and
suffered few illnesses. Traellison, for example,
was 450 years old, a fairly young age on her
home planet. The Aenstrians were communi¬
cating with Shuttlewood so that he could pass
on their information to Earths “councils.”

On May 24, 1967, Shuttlewood’s The
Warminster Mystery was published. In it he rel¬
egated the story of the Aenstrians s phone calls
to an appendix, where he suggested that they
were no more than an interesting hoax. On the
afternoon of the twenty-sixth, the phone rang
at the Shuttlewood residence. It was an Aens-
trian named Karne, expressing displeasure at
what the author had said of his colleagues’
trustworthiness. Shuttlewood responded that
if Karne wanted to prove he was who he
claimed to be, he should pay a personal visit.
Karne took up the challenge and showed up at
Shutdewood’s door seven seconds later.

Karne, who spent a total of nine minutes
with the journalist, looked like an ordinary man
in most ways, except for an apparent absence of
pupils in his eyes, which were covered by thick
glasses. He also had blue blotches on his cheek¬
bones and lips. He also had a manner that un¬
nerved Shuttlewood, who felt that the ostensi¬
ble extraterrestrial had powers that, if provoked,
could instantly destroy him. Karne said that
Traellison, Caellsan, and Selorik had returned
to their home “cantel” (planet). He spoke of an
imminent war in the Middle East—the Six-Day
War erupted the following June—and of fur¬
ther UFO appearances, this time of cross¬
shaped craft, in the fall. He said a Third World
War was almost inevitable at some point in the
not-distant future. If it was fought with nuclear
weapons, he hinted, extraterrestrials would in¬
tervene in some unspecified fashion. A new
order, in which earthlings would be trained to
become cosmic citizens, would be put in place.

“I noticed that Karne sometimes had diffi¬
culty with his breathing,” Shuttlewood wrote.

“From time to time, as I shot questions at
him ... he glanced at the pale gold disc on his
wrist. He replied to certain queries immedi¬
ately, shaking his head in the negative over
others, after looking at his ‘watch’” (Shuttle-
wood, 1978). At one point Shuttlewood
asked if George Adamski’s contact claims were
genuine. Karne replied sternly that he could
not answer that question, though he hinted
that the late California contactee was not of
earthly origin. At the conclusion of the meet¬
ing, Shuttlewood gripped Karnes wrist and
left thumb in what he intended as a gesture of
good will, but the visitor winced in pain. Ear¬
lier, at the commencement of their meeting,
Karne had not responded to Shuttlewood’s
outstretched hand.

Shuttlewood watched him walk, turning
stiffly to wave farewell, then continue up the
street. “From the waist up,” Shuttlewood
wrote, “his bearing was smart, military, almost
arrogantly proud. From the waist down, how¬
ever, his movements were slow and deliberate.
His legs seemed weighted, feet slightly drag¬
ging; yet to a casual onlooker he would have
been dismissed as an old gardener type or old-
fashioned and hard-worked farm laborer”
(Shuttlewood, 1978).

The next day Shuttlewood’s sixteen-year-
old son, Graham, saw a man who looked like
Karne at a Warminster park. He was looking
upward as military jets flew by, shaking his
head in disapproval. His left hand was band¬
aged as if it had been recently injured. That
was the last either saw of Karne.

See Also: Adamski, George; Contactees

Further Reading

Dewey, Stephen, 1997. “Arthur Shuttlewood and the
Warminster Mystery.” Strange Magazine 18
(Summer): 16-21, 56-58.

Shuttlewood, Arthur, 1967. The Warminster Mystery.
London: Neville Spearman.

-, 1978. UFO Prophecy. New York: Global

Communications.

Aetherius

Aetherius is one of the Cosmic Masters who
preside at the Interplanetary Parliament on

12 Affa

Saturn. In 1954 Aetherius made his presence
known psychically to George King, a London
man with longstanding occult interests. Soon
King was channeling other space people, in¬
cluding Jesus. By January he had gone public
with the cosmic gospel—essentially earth-
bound occult doctrines ascribed to philosoph¬
ical extraterrestrials—and soon was issuing a
mimeographed bulletin titled Aetherius Speaks
to Earth (later Cosmic Voice). In August 1956
King established the Aetherius Society, among
the most successful and enduring contactee
groups. King died on July 12, 1997, in Los
Angeles, where he had been living for many
years.

In the theology of the Aetherius Society,
good and evil extraterrestrials are engaged in
constant warfare. From time to time, during
crisis situations, the Cosmic B rotherhood will
place its spaceships above Earth and direct
positive energy downward. Society members
receive the energy and make sure that it
reaches its targets. Over a three and a half year
period, beginning in 1958, King climbed no
fewer than eighteen mountains at the behest
of the space people.

The society maintains headquarters in
London and Los Angeles, as well as chapters
all over the world.

Further Reading

Aetherius Society, 1995. The Aetherius Society: A Cos -
mic Concept. Hollywood, CA: Aetherius Society.

Curran, Douglas, 1985. In Advance of the Landing:
Folk Concepts of Outer Space. New York: Abbeville
Press.

Saliba, John A., 1995. “Religious Dimensions of
UFO Phenomena.” In James R. Lewis, ed. The
Gods Have Landed: Neiv Religions from Other
Worlds, 15-64. Albany, NY: State University of
New York Press.

Wallis, Roy, 1974. “The Aetherius Society: A Case
Study of a Mystagogic Congregation.” Sociologi -
cal Review 22: 27—44.

Affa

Affa first appeared in 1952 among the extra¬
terrestrials who communicated to a small
Prescott, Arizona, occult group headed by

George Hunt Williamson. Affa, identified as
being from the planet Uranus, first spoke
through automatic writing, then later al¬
legedly by radio, warning of threats to Earth
by evil humans and menacing aliens from the
“Orion Solar Systems.”

Affa later surfaced in automatic-writing
communications to Frances Swan of Eliot,
Maine, beginning in 1954. Mrs. Swan’s Affa,
like Williamsons, did his communicating
from a giant Uranian spaceship. Affa urged
Swan to alert the United States Navy so that it
could receive his radio messages. Swan told
her neighbor, retired navy Adm. Herbert B.
Knowles, about Affa’s request. Knowles, a
UFO enthusiast, sat in on a writing session
and addressed questions to Affa. Impressed by
the answers, he wrote the Office of Naval In¬
telligence (ONI), which on June 8 sent two
officers to Swan’s house. They also asked ques¬
tions of Affa, who promised a radio transmis¬
sion at 2 P.M. on June 10. When none came,
ONI lost interest and turned the letters over
to the navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics. John
Hutson, a security officer, was curious enough
to fly up to Eliot for two days in late July. On
his return he spoke with an FBI agent, but the
agency chose not to pursue the matter.

In the summer of 1959 navy Commander
Julius Larsen, an ONI liaison officer to the
CIA’s Photographic Intelligence Center in
Washington, DC, stumbled upon a file on the
incident. Larsen, a navy pilot who harbored a
private fascination with spiritualism, called on
Swan and Knowles. At one point Larsen tried
automatic writing and believed he had com¬
municated with Affa, though Swan insisted he
had not contacted her Affa.

Back in Washington Larsen talked with
Center Director Arthur Lundahl and Lun-
dahl’s assistant, Lt. Cmdr. Robert Neasham, a
navy officer. In their presence Larsen entered a
trance state and supposedly contacted Affa
while Lundahl and Neasham peppered him
with questions. At one point, challenged to
prove his existence, Affa replied, “Go to the
window.” Lundahl saw nothing but clouds,
though Neasham seemed convinced that a

Agharti 13

spaceship was hiding in them. Neasham
would also claim that radar operators at
Washington National Airport told him that
that particular portion of the sky was mysteri¬
ously “blocked out.” No independent evi¬
dence supported that allegation.

Neasham notified Major Robert Friend,
head of the air forces UFO-investigative
agency, Project Blue Book. For Friend’s bene¬
fit Larsen even related telepathic messages
from Affa and other space people, but the
aliens refused his request for a flyover. Friend
wrote a memo on the episode and sent it to
his superiors. Nothing further was done. The
incident remained buried in Pentagon, FBI,
and CIA files until the early 1970s, when
Friend shared his notes with UFO historian
David M. Jacobs. Subsequently, some exag¬
gerated accounts of the episode were pub¬
lished in the UFO literature, a few even
claiming that the CIA itself had communi¬
cated with extraterrestrials.

See Also: Williamson, George Hunt

Further Reading

Emenegger, Robert, 1974. UFOs Past, Present and
Future. New York: Ballantine Books.

Fitzgerald, Randall, 1979. “Messages: The Case His¬
tory of a Contactee.” Second Look 1, 12 (Octo¬
ber): 12-18, 28-29.

Jacobs, David M., 1975. The UFO Controversy in
America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Williamson, George Hunt, and Alfred C. Bailey,
1954. The Saucers Speak!A Documentary Report of
Interstellar Communications by Radiotelegraphy.
Los Angeles: New Age Publishing Company.

Agents

“Agents” are human beings whom extraterres¬
trials have contacted and who have agreed to
help the space people in their benevolent mis¬
sion to Earth. George Flunt Williamson wrote
that agents, who come from all social and eco¬
nomic backgrounds, sometimes have a
“strange, far-away, glassy look in their eyes.”
Their necks may throb or jump spasmodically,
indicating that they are receiving telepathic in¬
structions. The Agents conduct a variety of
tasks. They introduce persons who are of po¬
tential use to them to each other, recommend

books, ask provocative questions, and in other
ways, subtle or obvious, get people thinking
about space visitors and spiritual reform. They
also minister to the needy and have a particu¬
lar interest in orphaned children.

Extraterrestrials get in touch with Agents in
assorted ways. Sometimes it is through a car or
ham radio, sometimes via thought waves, on
occasion by direct, physical encounter.

See Also: Williamson, George Hunt

Further Reading

Williamson, George Hunt, 1953. Other Tongue —
Other Flesh. Amherst, WI: Amherst Press.

Agharti

Agharti is a subterranean kingdom, which al¬
legedly exists in Tibet or Mongolia. It is, de¬
pending on whom one believes, a paradisiacal
realm or a sinister lair of sorcerers and other
evildoers—mostly, however, the former. The
legend of Agharti seems loosely based on the
Buddhist realm of Shambhala, a city of adepts
and mystics said to be located in a hidden val¬
ley (called “Shangri-La” in James Hilton’s
popular novel Lost Horizon [1933] and in the
movie of the same name). Shambhala first ap¬
peared in a 1922 Polish book, soon afterward
translated into English as the best-seller Beasts,
Men and Gods.

The author, Ferdinand Ossendowski
(1876-1945), fled Russia in the wake of the
Bolshevik revolution. An anti-Communist,
Ossendowski participated in the White Rus¬
sian government, that nation’s short-lived ex¬
periment in democracy between the over¬
throw of the tsar and the triumph of the
Communists. He wandered through Mongo¬
lia, itself torn by political unrest and bloody
conflict. There he learned, he said, of a myste¬
rious “King of the World.” A lama in the
town of Narabanchi took him into a temple
in which there was a throne. Ossendowski was
told that in 1890 horsemen had ridden into
town and instructed all the local lamas to
come to the temple. One of the horsemen sat
on the throne, at which point all present “fell
to their knees as they recognized the man who

The hidden world of “Shangri-La” as depicted in the film Lost Horizon, directed by Frank Capra, 1937 (Photofest)

had been long ago described in the sacred
bulls of the Dalai Lama, Tashi Lama, and
Bodgo Khan. He was the man to whom the
whole world belongs and who has penetrated
into all the mysteries of Nature. He pro¬
nounced a short Tibetan prayer, blessed all his
hearers and afterwards made predictions for
the coming half century. This was thirty years
ago and in the interim all his prophecies are
being fulfilled” (Ossendowski, 1922). The
King of the World lived in an underground
realm called Agharti.

Whether this King of the World, or even
the author’s supposed informant, ever existed,
he and his kingdom soon entered occult lore.
In Darkness over Tibet (1935) Theodore Illion
recounted his allegedly true adventures in an
underground city in a distant valley. At first
he thought he had entered a utopia, but soon
he realized that the inhabitants, for all their

advanced spiritual knowledge and supernatu¬
ral powers, were cannibals. Illion wrote that
his reported experiences proved the existence
of Agharti. In 1946 Vincent H. Gaddis, a reg¬
ular contributor to Amazing Stories who later
achieved a degree of fame as the inventor of
the concept of the Bermuda Triangle, picked
up on the theme, depicting Agharti as a city of
evil that was linked to tunnels all over the
world. He incorporated Agharti into the
Shaver mystery, the subject of a series of tales
Amazing Stories was running about an alleged
underground realm populated by deros, de¬
monic entities in possession of a fantastic At-
lantean technology, which they used to tor¬
ment surface humans.

In a variant of the legend, Robert Ernst
Dickhoff’s Agharta: The Subterranean World
(1951) contended that two and a half million
years ago Martians landed at Antarctica, then

Akon 15

a tropical region, and created the first hu¬
mans. Then reptoid (that is, biped reptilian)
Venusians attacked, forcing the Martians and
their human associates to create two huge un¬
derground cities, connected by tunnels of vast
length, in order to protect themselves. One of
these cities was Shambhala, under Tibet, and
the other Agharta, under Chinas Tzangpo
Valley. Eventually, the Venusians conquered
Agharta, sending their evil minions into the
world until 1948, when the Martian/human
alliance reclaimed the city and slew its ruler,
the King of the World, and many of his
troops.

There is no real-life Central Asian tradition
of Agharti, though Chinese and Tibetan
equivalents to Western fairy lore spoke of mag¬
ical caves, on the other side of which the trav¬
eler would find a beautiful land and lovely but
ultimately treacherous supernatural beings.

Further Reading

Dickhoff, Robert Ernst, 1965. Agharta. New York:
Fieldcrest.

Kafton-Minkel, Walter, 1989. Subterranean Worlds:
100,000 Years of Dragons, Dwarf, the Dead, Lost
Races and UFOs from inside the Earth. Port
Townsend, WA: Loompanics Unlimited.

Ossendowski, Ferdinand, 1922. Beasts, Men and
Gods. New York: Dutton.

A hah

On a camping trip through eastern Oregon in
the summer of 1975, a young married couple
identified as Darryl and Toni M. stopped
along the banks of the Owyhee River to cool
their truck. They spotted an odd object
parked on a nearby hillside. The next thing
they knew, it was two hours later, and their
truck started as if it had long since cooled off.
Later, under hypnosis, they recounted the ex¬
perience of wandering into the UFO in a
trance state. Hairless humanoids with slits for
eyes, mouth, and nose, with gray, wrinkled
skin assured them via telepathy that they
meant no harm. As Toni watched, the aliens,
who communicated with each other with a
“buzzing bee” sound, subjected Darryl to an

apparent physical examination by light beam.
Sometime later Toni awoke to find a figure
with a skull-like face and a small mouth
standing at the foot of her bed. He spoke to
her, but all she could remember was that he
had told her his name was Ahab.

Further Reading

Hartman, Terry A., 1979. “Another Abduction by
Extraterrestrials.” MUFON UFO Journal 141
(November): 3—4.

Akon

Akon appeared to Elizabeth Klarer on April 6,
1956, when his spaceship landed in the Drak¬
ensberg Mountains of Natal, South Africa.
She was flown to a waiting mother ship,
where she met other friendly space people and
learned that they came from the beautiful
planet Meton in the orbit of Alpha Centauri
four light years away. The Metonites, she
learned, are vegetarians who live in a utopian
society without conflict or disease. They are
also a passionate people, and in due course, as
the contacts continued, Klarer and Akon be¬
came lovers. She bore him a son, Ayling, dur¬
ing a four-month stay on Meton.

Klarer became well known in saucer and oc¬
cult circles in South Africa and Europe where
she lectured from time to time. She distributed
photographs of Akon’s spacecraft and showed
inquirers a ring she said he had given her.
Though many dismissed her stories and evi¬
dence as bogus, her friend Cynthia Hind, a
well-known ufologist from Zimbabwe, be¬
lieved her to be sincere and has helped keep her
name and story alive. On the occasion of her
death in February 1994, Hind wrote, “Eliza¬
beth Klarer died in comparative poverty. . . .
Her incredible story brought her some fame (or
more accurately, notoriety!) but certainly no
riches” (Hind, 1994).

Further Reading

Hind, Cynthia, 1982. UFOs — African Encounters.
Salisbury, Zimbabwe: Gemini.

-, 1994. “MUFON Forum: Contactee

Klarer.” MUFON UFO Journal 315 (July): 18.

-, 1999. “Ufology Profile: Elizabeth Klarer.”

MUFON UFO Journal 379 (November): 10-11.

16 Alien diners

Klarer, Elizabeth, 1980. Beyond the Light Barrier.

Cape Town, South Africa: Howard Timmins.

Alien diners

An alien family ate at a restaurant and stayed
overnight in a motel in suburban St. Louis in
May 1970, according to ufologist John E.
Schroeder, who interviewed employees and
heard a strange and comic tale. Dorothy
Simpson, a front desk clerk at the motel and a
fellow member of the UFO Study Group of
Greater St. Louis, tipped Schroeder off to the
incident soon after its occurrence.

Simpson was examining billing documents
at her desk at 10:30 A.M. on May 15 when a
“whistling sigh” sounded. She looked up, and
on the other side of the desk stood four tiny
people, apparently members of a family: a
couple and their two children. All looked
strikingly alike. All were youthful in appear¬
ance, and the children were nearly the height
of the ostensible parents. They were so short
that they barely reached the level of the desk.
They were all expensively dressed, the males
in tailored suits, the females in pastel peach
dresses. Their hair did not look real. Odd as it
seemed, Simpson suspected that they were
wearing wigs.

In a falsetto voice the man said, “Do you
have a room to stay? Do you have a room to
stay?” She told him what the charges would
be, but he seemed not to understand what she
had said. He turned to his female companion
as if expecting her to clarify matters, but she
remained silent. An uncomfortable period of
silence followed, broken finally when the man
reached into his pocket and pulled out a thick
wad of bills, many of large denomination.
The bills were so crisp and new that Simpson
wondered if they were counterfeit, but some
quick informal testing suggested they were
not. She took two twenty-dollar bills from the
stack and gave the rest back.

Because the man was too small to reach up
to fill out the reservation form, Simpson said
she would do it for him. He said his name was
“A. Bell.” As he stepped forward she got a bet¬

ter look at him and was able to compare his
face with his companions’. According to
Schroeder, whose composite description
comes from his interviews with Simpson and
other motel employees who saw them, they
were “wide at eye level, their faces thinned
abruptly to their chins. Their eyes were large,
dark and slightly slanted. . . . Their noses had
practically no bridges and two slits for nos¬
trils, and their mouths were tiny and lipless—
no wider than their nostrils. All look uni¬
formly pale. (Color descriptions varied from
pearl to pale pink to light grey.)”

“And where are you from?” Simpson asked.
At that the man’s arm shot upward as if point¬
ing to the sky, and he said, “We come from up
there. Up there.” The woman pushed his arm
down and spoke for the first time. She said
they were from Hammond, Indiana, and she
gave a street address. The man signed the reg¬
ister but did it so awkwardly that Simpson
thought he seemed not to know how to use a
pen. The woman wanted to know where they
could eat. Simpson indicated the direction of
the motel restaurant.

Meanwhile, the bellhop came over to store
their bags while they ate. At the manager’s in¬
sistence Simpson checked the Indiana address
and learned that both the name and the ad¬
dress were bogus. The bellhop checked the
parking lot for a car with an Indiana license
plate but found none.

The hostess who led the strange family to a
table in the restaurant noticed that the chins
of even the adults barely reached the top of
the table. The man read aloud from the menu
and kept asking odd questions about where
milk, vegetables, and other common foods
come from. The woman ordered peas and
milk for herself and the children, and for the
man peas, a small steak, and water. Their eat¬
ing was similarly peculiar. Each picked up a
single pea with a knife, brought it to his or her
tiny mouth, and inhaled it with a sucking
sound. The father was unable to get even a
small piece of steak through his slit of a
mouth. They stopped eating all at the same
time. The man produced a twenty-dollar bill

Alien DNA 17

and gave it to the waitress, who went to get
change; when she returned, they were gone.

When the bellhop saw them, he retrieved
their baggage and stepped into the elevator to
lead them to their room. When the elevator
door opened, though, the family recoiled in
fright and confusion. The bellhop had to as¬
sure them that there was no danger. After let¬
ting them into the room, he turned on the
lights. Suddenly the man began shouting at
him that the light would hurt the children’s
eyes. Suddenly frightened himself, the bellhop
fled without waiting—one suspects futilely, in
any case—for a tip.

The bellhop, the manager, and Simpson
vowed to watch for the little people’s depar¬
ture in the morning, but they were never seen
again, though the front door was the only
door they could pass through without setting
off a security alarm. The alarms were checked,
and nothing was amiss. Schroeder interviewed
all five employees who had interacted with the
family. All seemed sincerely bewildered by the
curious series of events.

Further Reading

Schroeder, John E., 1987. “The Strangers among
Us.” The UFO Enigma 7, 7 (June): 36.

Alien DNA

Physical evidence of abduction experiences is
hard to come by, and physical evidence of ac¬
tual aliens is all but nonexistent. A case from
Australia may be an exception. Biochemists
were able to analyze, with curious results, a
strand of what was reported to be the hair of
an alien woman.

The events that led to the analysis began
on the night of July 12, 1988, when Peter
Khoury, a Sydney resident of Lebanese back¬
ground, was awakened suddenly when he
sensed that something had grabbed his ankles.
A numbness crept up his body from the feet,
and soon his entire body except for his eyes
was paralyzed. To his right he spotted three or
four small hooded figures with wrinkled,
shiny black faces. Through telepathy they as¬

sured him he would not be harmed. Khoury
then saw two other figures on his left. “These
two,” he later told investigator Bill Chalker,
“were thin, tall with big black eyes and a nar¬
row chin.” They were “gold-yellow in color.”
One of these beings shoved a needle into the
left side of his forehead, and he passed out.

The next day he showed the puncture
wound to his fiancee. Later he showed it to
his doctor, who thought he had walked into a
nail. When Khoury told him what had hap¬
pened, the physician laughed at him. He
found that this was a typical response and
grew despondent and anxious, worried about
the strange nature of the experience, about
the future, about his inability to communi¬
cate with anyone who would listen to him.
Eventually, his fiancee found a copy of Whit¬
ley Strieber’s Communion (1987), detailing
the author’s personal abduction experiences.
In time he heard about and joined a local
UFO group but left it still unsatisfied. In
April 1993 he founded the UFO Experience
Support Association.

On July 23, 1992, Khoury had a second,
even stranger encounter. He was suffering from
the effects of an assault by three men at his job,
and as a consequence he was on strong medica¬
tion and mostly bed-ridden. On the morning in
question, he managed with considerable diffi¬
culty to drive his wife—he was now married—
to the train station so that she could get to
work. Once home he crawled back into bed and
passed out, only to awaken a few minutes later.
He was sitting straight up and staring at two
nude women sitting on the bed.

They were strange-looking, with a weird,
glassy-eyed expression. One looked generally
Asian, something like an East Indian; the
other was blond, with eyes two or three times
larger than normal. Their cheekbones seemed
abnormally high. The dark woman was watch¬
ing her companion closely, as if the blond were
demonstrating something to her. The blond
pulled Khoury toward her breasts, apparently
initiating a sex act. He tried to resist, but she
was too strong for him. As he struggled, he bit
her nipple so hard that he bit it off. He could

18 Aliens and the dead

feel it in his throat. The woman only looked at
him in puzzlement. She did not act as if she
were in pain, and there was no blood. At that
point the two vanished.

The nipple was caught in his throat, caus¬
ing him to cough persistently for hours. Even¬
tually, he was able to swallow it. In the mean¬
time, feeling pain in his genital region, he
examined his penis. There he found two hairs
wrapped tightly around it. He had no idea
how they had gotten there, unless they had
been placed on his penis as he was sleeping.
As he untangled them, he felt enormous pain.
He preserved the strands—one about twelve
centimeters long, the other about six—in a
plastic bag.

Though many abductees have reported sex¬
ual experiences with aliens (or, as some re¬
searchers think, alien/human hybrids), none
have come out of the experience with a sup¬
posed part of an alien body.

In 1999 Chalker, a chemist by profession
and a well-regarded UFO investigator by avo¬
cation, brought the strands to a group of bio¬
chemists for analysis. The analysis reads in
part:

The blonde hair provides for a strange and un¬
usual DNA sequence, showing five consistent
substitutions from a human consensus . . .
which could not easily have come from anyone
else in the Sydney area except by the rarest of
chances; is not apparently due to any sort of
laboratory contamination; and is found only in
a few other people throughout the whole
world. . . .

While it may not be impossible for him to
have had sexual contact with some fair¬
skinned, nearly albino female from the Syd¬
ney area, such an explanation is ruled out by
the DNA evidence, which fits only a Chinese
Mongoloid as a donor of the hair. Further¬
more, while it might be possible to find a few
Chinese in Sydney with the same DNA as
seen in just 4% ofTaiwanese women, it
would not be plausible to find a Chinese
woman here with thin, almost clear hair, hav¬
ing the same rare DNA. Finally, that thin
blonde hair could not plausibly represent a

chemically-bleached Chinese (including the
root) because then its DNA could not easily
have been extracted.

The most probable donor of the hair must
therefore be as the young man claims: a tall
blonde female who does not need much color
in her hair or skin as a form of protection
against the sun, perhaps because she does not
require it. Could this young man really have
provided, by chance, a hair sample which con¬
tains DNA from one of the rarest human line¬
ages known . . . that lies further from the
mainstream than any other except for African
Pygmies and aboriginals? (Chalker, 1999).

See Also: Abductions by UFOs; Hybrid beings;
Strieber, Whitley

Further Reading

Chalker, Bill, 1999. “Strange Evidence.” Interna -
tional UFO Reporter 24, 1 (Spring): 3-16, 31.
Strieber, Whitley, 1987. Communion: A True Story.
New York: Beach Tree/William Morrow.

Aliens and the dead

In the view of UFO-abduction investigator
David M. Jacobs, aliens sometimes take on
the form of deceased relatives in the interest of
keeping their activities secret.

He recounts the experience of a woman to
whom he gives the pseudonym Fily Martin¬
son. Vacationing with her mother in the Vir¬
gin Islands in 1987, Martinson woke up in
her hotel room to observe the apparition of
her dead brother watching her from the foot
of the bed. The experience comforted her.
Eater, however, when Jacobs put her under
hypnosis, Martinson saw the individual she
had thought was her brother as, in Jacobs’s
words, “a person without clothes, small, thin,
no hair, and large eyes.” He calls such indi¬
viduals as Martinson “unaware abductees.”
Unaware abductees “explain their strange ex¬
periences in ways acceptable to society, inter¬
preting the entities they see as ghosts, angels,
demons, or even animals.”

See Also: Abductions by UFOs

Further Reading

Jacobs, David M., 1998. The Threat. New York:

Simon and Schuster.

Alpha Zoo Loo 19

Allingham’s Martian

According to Flying Saucer from Mars (1954),
Englishman and author Cedric Allingham
witnessed the landing of an extraterrestrial
spacecraft while vacationing in Scotland in
February 1954. A tall man, human in all ways
except for an unusually broad forehead,
stepped out of the vehicle. The occupant, who
indicated that he was from Mars, spoke in a
friendly fashion, saying that he had earlier vis¬
ited Venus and the moon. He asked if earth¬
lings would soon visit the latter world, and
when Allingham replied yes, the Martian
acted concerned. He wanted to know if a war
would soon erupt on Earth. After this conver¬
sation, which occurred mostly by gestures, the
Martian reentered his craft and flew away,
though not before Allingham had pho¬
tographed him (from the back) and his ship.
The book asserted that a man named James
Duncan had witnessed the entire encounter.

A year earlier George Adamski had pub¬
lished his account of a meeting with the
Venusian Orthon in the southern California
desert. Allingham’s tale thrilled British sauce-
rians, who now felt they had their own con¬
tact. Waveney Girvan, who had published the
British edition of Adamski and Desmond
Leslie’s book, wrote, “If Allingham is telling
the truth, his account following so soon upon
Adamski’s amounts to final proof of the exis¬
tence of flying saucers” (Girvan, 1956).

Allingham proved strangely elusive, how¬
ever, making only one public appearance. He
showed up in the company of a virulently anti-
UFO science writer and media personality
Patrick Moore. That, plus the failure of inquir¬
ers to find the alleged witness to Allingham’s
contact, should have warned British saucerians
that all was not well with the story told by their
native Adamski. In 1956 Allingham’s pub¬
lisher—also the publisher of Moore s books—
released a statement asserting that the contactee
had died of tuberculosis in a Swiss sanitarium.

In a book on British UFOs published thir¬
teen years later, journalist Robert Chapman
reported that he had found no evidence that a
Cedric Allingham had ever existed. In his

judgment, Flying Saucer from Mars amounted
to “probably the biggest UFO leg-pull ever
perpetrated in Britain” (Chapman, 1969). It
was an open secret among Moore’s friends
that he and a friend, Peter Davies (the “Mart¬
ian” in the photograph), had written the book
as a spoof on those gullible enough to believe
Adamski’s contact tales. Moore, well known as
a practical joker, once had regaled a contactee
magazine with letters, written under an as¬
sortment of absurd pseudonyms (including
“L. Puller”), claiming scientific confirmation
of the contactee cosmos.

Eventually word of Moore and Davies’s in¬
volvement trickled down to British ufologists.
Two of them, Christopher Allan and Steuart
Campbell, interviewed Davies who admitted
the hoax and added that he had rewritten the
original manuscript to disguise Moore’s dis¬
tinctive literary style. After the hoax was ex¬
posed for the first time in print in the London
ufology journal Magonia, Moore professed to
be outraged, threatened legal retaliation, and
then retreated into telling silence.

See Also: Adamski, George; Brown’s Martians; Den-
tons’s Martians and Venusians; Hopkins’s Mar¬
tians; Khauga; Martian bees; Mince-Pie Mar¬
tians; Monka; Muller’s Martians; Orthon; Shaw’s
Martians; Smead’s Martians; Wilcox’s Martians

Further Reading

Allan, Christopher, and Steuart Campbell, 1986.
“Flying Saucer from Moore’s?” Magonia 23
(July): 15-18.

Allingham, Cedric [pseud, of Patrick Moore and
Peter Davies], 1954. London: Frederick Muller.

Chapman, Robert, 1969. Unidentified Flying Objects.
London: Arthur Barker.

Girvan, Waveney, 1956. Flying Saucers and Common
Sense. New York: Citadel Press.

Leslie, Desmond, and George Adamski, 1953. Flying
Saucers Have Landed. New York: British Book
Centre.

“News Briefs,” 1956/1957. Saucer News 4,1 (De¬
cember/January): 12.

Tory, Peter, 1986. “I See No Hoax, Says Patrick.”
The [London] Star (July 28).

Alpha Zoo Loo

Trucker Harry Joe Turner allegedly met an
alien named Alpha Zoo Loo during a fright-

20 Alyn

ening encounter on a Virginia highway. The
first incident reportedly took place on the
night of August 28, 1979, when a UFO hov¬
ered over his truck. Even though the truck
was moving at seventy miles per hour, an alien
figure opened the door, and a terrified Turner
fired several pistol shots at it, without appar¬
ent effect. Turner blacked out, returning to
consciousness in the Fredericksburg ware¬
house that had been his destination.

Turner noted other anomalies. His odome¬
ter indicated that he had traveled seventeen
miles though he knew that Winchester, his
starting point, and Fredericksburg were
eighty miles apart. An odd, filmy substance
covered the truck, and parts of his CB and
AM/FM antennae were missing, as if they
had been melted or cut off. He also com¬
plained of a burning sensation in his eyes.
While trying to enter his truck to resume his
journey, Turner passed out and was taken to a
hospital. After a short stay he was released
and, on returning home, suddenly “remem¬
bered” that the UFO had lifted both him and
the truck inside it.

Turner also recalled that the craft carried a
crew of white-clad, humanlike beings who
wore caps. When they took the caps off,
Turner could see a series of numbers stamped,
or otherwise impressed, on their heads. They
spoke in a squeaky, high-pitched tone. Only
when one of them, Alpha Zoo Loo, slowed his
speech could Turner understand it.

As they traveled through space, Alpha Zoo
Loo asked Turner questions about his truck.
Eventually they arrived at a planet two and a
half light years beyond Alpha Centauri, where
dome-covered cities dotted an otherwise dev¬
astated landscape. Turner had the impression
that the civilization had experienced a nuclear
war in its not-distant past.

Back on Earth, Turner later claimed other
contacts with Alpha Zoo Loo and assorted
aliens. His erratic behavior, however, undercut
his credibility, leading friends, family mem¬
bers, and onlookers to wonder about his psy¬
chological stability. Investigators also learned
of Turner’s reputation for yarn-spinning.

Further Reading

Hendry, Allan, 1980. “Abducted! Four Startling Sto¬
ries of 1979.” Frontiers of Science 2, 4 (July/Au¬
gust): 25-31, 36.

Whiting, Fred, 1980. “The Abduction of Harry Joe
Turner.” MUFON UFO Journal 145 (March):
3-7.

Alyn

“Alyn” is the name Constance Weber, who
wrote under the name Marla Baxter, gives
Howard Menger in her book My Saturnian
Lover (1958). Weber/Baxter relates that after
being widowed, she devoted herself to an in¬
terest in flying saucers. In the summer of
1956, she joined a group headed by Alyn R.,
who “was said to have had contacts with peo¬
ple from other worlds.” Alyn eventually re¬
veals his secret to her: “I am not of this world!
I am a volunteer to Earth from the planet Sat¬
urn.” On Saturn, he tells her, he was the spiri¬
tual teacher Sol da Naro. In the meantime, on
Earth, the two become lovers. She writes, “My

Howard and Connie Menger (August C. Roberts/Fortean
Picutre Library)

Andra-o-leeka and Mondra-o-leeka 21

Saturnian lover did wonderful things for
me. . . . My body seemed to grow more softly
contoured through this pygmalion transfor¬
mation as the Saturnian sculptor, by his
unique artistry, molded me by his every elec¬
tric touch and caress.” At the end of the book,
she learns that in a previous incarnation she
had been Marla, a Venusian beauty in love
with Sol da Naro.

During the time period covered by the
book, Howard Menger, a sort of East Coast
counterpart to California’s George Adamski,
left his wife, Rose, for Connie Weber. At
one point during their affair, but before
Menger had ended his marriage, four disil¬
lusioned followers accused Weber of imper¬
sonating a spacewoman who was supposed
to be granting them an audience in an un¬
lighted room. The couple survived the scan¬
dal, however, and were married in due
course. Eventually, they moved to Florida,
where they live now.

Further Reading

Baxter, Marla [pseud, of Constance Weber Menger],
1958. My Saturnian Lover. New York: Vantage
Press.

‘“Very Sincere Fellow’ Howard Menger Returns to
Long John Program,” 1957. CSI News Letter 21
(November 1): 14—16.

Ameboids

A professional woman writing under the
pseudonym Lisa Oakman claims that from
childhood into her early twenties she experi¬
enced many encounters with nonhuman be¬
ings. Most were generally humanlike in ap¬
pearance, but the most exotic she calls
“ameboids.”

The ameboids were “horrible” and “night¬
marish” entities, shaped like amoebas, with
the colors of bruises. They attached their wet
snouts to the fleshy areas of her body, sucked,
and left round, red marks in their wake. Some
seemed to be taking energy, others blood.
They would come into her bedroom at night,
and she was too terrified to resist them. She
lay paralyzed while they did their work, and

she did not resume activity—in this case,
screaming—until they were gone.

Further Reading

Oakman, Lisa [pseud.], 1999. “UFO Beings, Folk¬
lore, and Mythology: Personal Experiences.” Ln -
ternational UFO Reporter 24, 4 (Winter): 7-12.

Andolo

Andolo was a being channeled by contactee
Trevor James Constable. Andolo, a member of
the Council of Seven Lights, a kind of cosmic
governing board consisting of wise space peo¬
ple, communicated from a vast extraterrestrial
satellite, Shan-Chea, in orbit around Earth.

In the mid-1950s, concerned about myste¬
rious disappearances of airplanes and their
crews, Constable asked Andolo if he and his
associates ever abducted or killed human be¬
ings in this way. Andolo assured him that the
“Universal plan” kept them from causing “a
physical death wittingly under any circum¬
stance.” He warned, however, that “dark ones”
did not recognize these laws. They would steal
earthly aircraft in order to learn about earthly
technology, and “they may desire the entities
[persons] in the airplane for purposes of their
own, regarding which I shall presently tell you
nothing” (James, 1958).

See Also: Contactees

Further Reading

James, Trevor [pseud, of Trevor James Constable],
1958. They Live in the Sky Los Angeles: New Age
Publishing Company.

Andra-o-leeka and Mondra-o-leeka

Chief Frank Buck Standing Horse, an Ottawa
Indian from Oklahoma, met Andra-o-leeka
and Mondra-o-leeka onboard a spaceship that
took him to several planets in July 1959. The
ship, called Vea-o-mus, landed around 10 P.M.
on the evening of the twelfth. Piloted by
Andra-o-leeka, the ship took off again, this
time going to Mars, then to Venus. After a
short stay there, a female pilot, Mondra-o-
leeka, a Venusian, relieved Andra-o-leeka, and
the ship went on to Clarion, a planet hidden
on the other side of the sun. (Clarion first ap-

22 Angel of the Dark

pears in contactee stories after Truman Bethu-
rum reported meeting a “scow” [a small space¬
craft] and its pilot, the beautiful Aura Rhanes,
who hailed from that planet.) After a short
stop on Clarion, Vea-o-mus took a two-hour
journey to a planet called Oreon (as opposed
to “Orion,” a constellation). Standing Horse
stayed there for two days.

Oreon, he reported, was a beautiful planet,
so lovely that as a man of the gospel he won¬
dered if he were in heaven. “Heaven is a long
way from here,” he was told (Dean, 1964).
While there, he ate well, mostly fish as well as
fresh fruit from giant plants.

Several years later on December 22, 1962,
Standing Horse entered a spacecraft near Bak¬
ersfield, California, and was taken to Jupiter
where he saw a magnificent building made of
marble. He witnessed the dancing of “five
tribes of Indians.” In a Jupiter city, at the
Church of the Open Door, he heard a concert
in which Handel’s The Messiah was sung. At
one point he saw a screen that recorded scenes
from Earth. According to Standing Horse, the
people of Jupiter are better-looking versions
of earthlings, with the races living together in
harmony.

The chief was returned to Earth three days
later, on the evening of Christmas Day. His
hosts drove him back to a Hollywood bus sta¬
tion in a car without wheels and powered by
electromagnetic energy. “Two cops were ar¬
resting two men on the corner,” Standing
Horse wrote to John W. Dean, “and were they
dumbfounded when they saw the car come
down and let me out!”

Standing Horse claimed to have met Mon-
dra-o-leeka one more time on the streets of
Cedko, California, on October 11, 1962.

See Also: Aura Rhanes; Bucky; Contactees

Further Reading

Dean, John W., 1964. Flying Saucers and the Scrip -
tures. New York: Vantage Press.

Angel of the Dark

On several occasions, New Age writer Alice
Bryant has encountered the Angel of the

Dark, who sometimes calls herself “an Angel
of the Divine Plan.” The angel stands nearly
three stories tall. “Large, matte-dark feathers
with iridescent tips” cover her. She wraps her
wings around herself like a cloak and wears a
wooden bird mask from which a long, sharp
beak extends.

She is here to take away all those feelings
and fears that impede spiritual progress. Her
bird mask symbolizes her connection with the
vulture, which removes carrion, and the eagle,
which soars toward the light. “I cleanse the
shadow side into perfection,” she says.

Further Reading

Bryant, Alice, and Linda Seebach, 1997. Opening to
the Infinite: Htiman Multidimensional Potential.
Mill Spring, NC: Wild Flower Press.

Angelucci, Orfeo (1912-1993)

Orfeo Angelucci was among the most inter¬
esting of the early contactees. Unlike many of
his contemporaries, he was generally deemed

UFO contactee Orfeo Angelucci (Fortean Picture Library)

Anoah 23

sincere, even by skeptics who tended to see
him as something of a religious visionary in a
flying-saucer context rather than as a cynical
exploiter of the credulous. Angelucci's initial
contact allegedly occurred on May 24, 1952,
in Burbank, California. Driving home from
work at an aircraft factory, he saw a saucer,
which emitted two small globes. The globes
approached him, and a masculine voice as¬
sured him that he had nothing to fear. An-
gelucci saw a crystal cup materialize, and he
drank a delicious, healing liquid from it. A
screen appeared before him, showing a strik¬
ing-looking man and woman who seemed to
read his mind. Another visionary experience,
initiated like the first time by a “dulling of
consciousness” (Angelucci, 1955), occurred
two months later. On August 2, he had a
physical encounter with space people for the
first time.

Angelucci soon went public with his expe¬
riences, warning that a world war was immi¬
nent. From the ruins of the world, a “New
Age of Earth” would arise. He also related
that after six months of unusual psychologi¬
cal symptoms, as well as “vivid dreams of a
hauntingly beautiful, half-familiar world,” he
was transported to a beautiful otherworld.
He learned that he had lived there in another
life, when he was known as “Neptune.” An¬
gelucci wrote two books on his experiences
and became a prominent figure on the con-
tactee circuit. With the passing of the initial
wave of enthusiasm about contactees, An¬
gelucci became little more than a distant
memory of saucerdom’s heady early days. His
death in Los Angeles on July 24, 1993, was
little noted.

In his time, however, his claims attracted
the attention of the celebrated psychologist
and philosopher C. G. Jung, who wrote about
them in one of his last books. Jung observed,
“The individuation process, the central prob¬
lem of modern psychology, is plainly depicted
. . . in an unconscious, symbolic form ... al¬
though the author with his somewhat primi¬
tive mentality has taken it quite literally as a
concrete happening” (Jung, 1959).

Thtt SECRET

of ilio

SAUCERS

GRflO

ANGILUCC!

ik . 4 1 -j(_- .:111 r .4 .>r-J in-
iuu — ih- icu jc-
wjm fl * p«|«i

sncc yrJl Etc muilci Lawn
fiiii*r ijoii’ mtiB- ji'i il our
burden p** « ■■
iifr c4 h;f-r.

The cover of The Secret of the Saucers by Orfeo
Angelucci (Fortean Picture Library)

See Also: Channeling
Further Reading

Ached, Fretter, 1963. Melchizedek: Truth Principles.

Phoenix, AZ: Lockhart Research Foundation.
Weiss, Jann, 1986. Reflections by Anoah. Austin, TX:
Planetary Light Association.

Anthon

At the contactee-oriented Rocky Mountain
Conference on UFO Investigation held in
Laramie, Wyoming, in May 1982, Ken
McLean read a statement from “a Mr. Watan-
abe,” who claimed to be an extraterrestrial liv¬
ing in a human body. His true name was An¬
thon, and he was in his third earthly
incarnation. The first was during the Revolu¬
tionary War, he said. He was one of 150,000
“incarnate beings” living on our planet and
observing our activities. These beings tele-
pathically communicated their findings to
space people both on the surface of our planet
and in our upper atmosphere.

According to Anthon, we are now entering
the end of an age that began with Jesus’ ap¬
pearance, though Anthon believes Jesus was
not the Son of God but “the only human
being to have incarnated through enough life¬
times and enough karmic experiences to tran¬
scend death. . . . He is in charge of the transi¬
tion into a ‘New Age’ which will occur
sometime in the near future.”

Anthon claimed that many incarnate be¬
ings do not know their true identity; thus they
have to be awakened to it.

See Also: Contactees

Further Reading

Sprinkle, R. Leo, ed., 1982. Proceedings: Rocky
Mountain Conference on UFO Investigation.
Laramie: School of Extended Studies, University
of Wyoming.

Antron

Driving along a section of highway between
Jacksonville and Callahan, Florida, one Au¬
gust night in 1974, businesswoman Lydia

Stalnaker saw a bright, flashing light just
above some nearby treetops. A suffocating
sensation enfolded her, and she lost con¬
sciousness. When she awoke, she was still be¬
hind the wheel, but on a different road. Soon
she learned that three hours, for which she
could not account, had passed. Under hypno¬
sis in May 1975, she “recalled” being taken
into a spacecraft, where aliens told her that
another woman would be placed inside her
body. She saw the woman sitting on the other
side of a table from her. Stalnaker’s head was
placed inside some kind of mechanical device,
and she passed out. When she revived, a
spaceman told her she was now one of them.
He escorted her out of the ship, and she re¬
turned to her car.

Subsequently, Stalnaker claimed, she found
that she had extraordinary psychic gifts that
allowed her to read other people’s minds and
to practice paranormal healing. Before long
Stalnaker was channeling the alien woman,
who called herself Antron. Antron reported
that she was from a “star galaxy.” She had
come to prepare earthlings for a great cata¬
clysm. “We want to take the good people with
us to recolonize elsewhere,” she said (Beckley,
1989).

See Also: Channeling

Further Reading

Beckley, Timothy Green, 1989. Psychic and UFO
Revelations in the Last Days. New Brunswick, NJ:
Inner Light Publications.

Gansberg, Judith M., and Alan L. Gansberg, 1980.
Direct Encounters: The Personal Histories of UFO
Abductees. New York: Walker and Company.

Anunnaki

Ancient-astronaut theorist Zecharia Sitchin,
author of a series of books under the rubric
The Earth Chronicles, argues that a race of hu¬
manlike beings, the Anunnaki, live on the
planet Nibiru (also known as Maldek), the al¬
leged twelfth planet of our solar system.
Though unknown to astronomers, Nibiru, on
an elliptical orbit, circles our sun every 3,600
years. According to Sitchin, Nibiru will be in
our immediate planetary space in the near fu-

Apol, Mr. 25

ture and will be detected between Mars and
Jupiter. When that happens, the Anunnaki
will make their presence known by appearing
on Earth.

Sitchin’s ideas are based on his reading of
ancient Sumerian documents. In his view
they confirm that the Anunnaki—a Sumer¬
ian term—created humans in their image,
via genetic engineering with the DNA of na¬
tive anthropoids, after their arrival some
four-hundred thousand five-hundred years
ago. These original earthlings were created so
that they could work as slaves in the Anun-
naki’s terrestrial gold mines; the extraterres¬
trials needed the gold to preserve the atmos¬
phere of their home world. Many thousands
of years later, they returned to give the
Sumerians and Egyptians their respective
civilizations and actually lived among these
people for a thousand years. One visitor
from Nibiru, Enki, reportedly saved the
human race. When a hostile alien, Enlil,
tried to keep the Anunnaki from warning
humans that the passing near Earth of
Nibiru would cause an immense tidal wave,
which would sweep over Earth and destroy
its inhabitants, Enki resisted. He told Noah,
of biblical fame, about the coming deluge,
and Noah set to work on his ark, thus ensur¬
ing the survival of earthly life.

The Anunnaki supposedly live a very long
time because one year to them is the number
of earthly years it takes their planet to go
around the sun. Their technology is so ad¬
vanced that they developed space flight half a
million years ago. They are also able to revive
the dead.

One critic has written, “Clearly, Sitchin is a
smart man. He weaves a complicated tale
from the bits and pieces of evidence that sur¬
vive from ancient Sumeria to the present day.
Just as clearly, Sitchin is capable of academic
transgressions (fracturing quotes, ignoring
dissenting facts) . . . and flights of intellectual
fancy. . . . Worst of all, he is almost utterly in¬
nocent of astronomy and other assorted fields
of modern science” (Hafernik, 1996).

Further Reading

Hafernik, Rob, 1996. “Sitchin’s Twelfth Planet.”
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Corridor/
8148/hafernik.html

Schultz, Dave. “The Earth Chronicles: Time Chart.”
http://www.geocities.com/Area5 1 / Corri¬
dor/ 8148/zchron.html

Sitchin, Zecharia, 1976. The Twelfth Planet. New
York: Stein and Day.

-, 1980. The Stairtmy to Heaven. New York:

St. Martins Press.

-, 1985. The Wars of Gods and Men. New

York: Avon Books.

Apol, Mr.

In the mid to late 1960s, while researching
material for a series of books, occult jour¬
nalist John A. Keel allegedly received a se¬
ries of phone calls from “Mr. Apol,” a badly
confused, interdimensional entity. Apol did
not know where he was in time, often con¬
fusing past and future, and traveling
through both involuntarily. According to
Keel, “he and all his fellow entities . . .
[played] out their little games because they
were programmed to do so” (Keel, 1975).
In the fashion of psychic vampires, they
lived off the energies of contactees and
other experients of the paranormal. Keel be¬
lieved Apol to be an ultraterrestrial as op¬
posed to an extraterrestrial, because in
Keel’s view such entities come from other
realities rather than other planets.

Though Keel did not meet Apol himself, a
Long Island woman saw him pull up to her
house in a black Cadillac, a vehicle favored by
the enigmatic men in black, earthly agents for
unearthly intelligences. Keel reported that the
woman thought Apol looked “Hawaiian.”
When he introduced himself, he shook her
hand. His own hand was “as cold as ice.”

Keel dedicated his book Our Haunted Planet
(1971) to “Mr. Apol, wherever you are.”

See Also: Contactees; Keel, John Alva; Time travel¬
ers; Ultraterrestrials

Further Reading

Keel, John A., 1975. The Mothman Prophecies. New
York: Saturday Review Press/E. P. Dutton and
Company.

26 Arna and Parz

Arna and Parz

Between 1976 and 1980 a family at Oaken-
holt in northern Wales underwent a complex
series of extraordinary experiences. Perhaps
the first event involved six-year-old Gaynor
Sunderland, who, while playing in a field one
summer afternoon, spotted a cigar-shaped
craft resting on the ground. She saw a man in
a spacesuit walking in front of the object,
using a gunlike device to burn holes into the
ground. Apparently caught by surprise, the
being stared at her, and Gaynor had the im¬
pression that he was probing her mind. An
angry-looking woman appeared alongside
him, and Gaynor felt the same sensation of
mind-intrusion. Hearing noises from within
the craft, the woman returned to the space¬
craft, and the young girl took the opportunity
to flee. Many other bizarre UFO incidents in¬
volving all five Sunderland children as well as
their parents took place subsequently.

In February 1979 Gaynor glimpsed two
smiling beings who had appeared in some
nearby bushes and then vanished when she
turned away. On June 24 she encountered the
same alien couple in a sort of out-of-body ex¬
perience. Lying in bed at 11 P.M., she saw the
ceiling open into a tunnel, sucking her in to¬
ward a distant light. Once she reached the end
of the journey, the couple—now accompanied
by a small boy—greeted her. The woman was
named Arna, the man Parz. They gave her a
tour of their world, showing her a stream as
well as some vegetation unlike anything on
Earth. Their manner was courteous but not
particularly warm. When Arna touched
Gaynor’s hand, the visitor witnessed a great
city under a red sun and unclouded blue sky.
All of the people in the city looked young.
After the vision faded, Arna said good-bye via
telepathy and promised another meeting.
Gaynor returned to the tunnel and ended up
in her bed.

A few weeks later, in August, Arna reap¬
peared to display images of a destroyed Earth.
She asked Gaynor for her assistance in direct¬
ing an energy being back to its proper resi¬
dence. Gaynor, her brother Darren, and her

parents walked to a field and meditated until
they sensed that the intruder was gone.

On the night of September 14, Arna and
Parz appeared and took Gaynor into their
spacecraft. Besides the couple she knew, there
were three others. One looked so close to
being purely human that Gaynor wondered if
the young woman, who looked to be about
nineteen years of age, was some kind of hy¬
brid. Gaynor noticed a picture on the wall of
a male being like Parz, only older. He was
standing by a globe of a planet that clearly was
not Earth. The ship flew into space. Half an
hour later Arna and Parz told her that it had
reached its destination, which turned out to
be a kind of zoo full of bizarre creatures, all of
them in twos. The animals were not in cages
and had a great deal of space in which to wan¬
der. Finally, the sights were too unsettling for
Gaynor, and her hosts permitted her to return
to the ship. Before they parted, however,
Gaynor learned that Arna and Parz were
“about 3500 of your years old” (Randles and
Whetnall, 1981).

Gaynor sensed somehow that she had not
really been in space. What she had experi¬
enced were vivid mental images that the aliens
had beamed into her brain. At the same time,
she was certain that she had not dreamed any
of this; it was much too real and had none of
the distinguishing characteristics of dreams.

Further Reading

Randles, Jenny, and Paul Whetnall, 1981. Alien Con -
tact: Window on Another World. London: Neville
Spearman.

Artemis

Artemis hails from the planet Miranda, lo¬
cated in an uncharted region of the Milky
Way galaxy. He and the thirteen thousand be¬
ings on his team orbit Earth in a giant space
platform, focusing their attention on most of
the North American continent. Other space¬
ships from other places attend to the rest of
Earth. Artemis, who channeled through An¬
thony and Lynn Volpe in 1981, said that he

Ashtar 27

seeks to raise humanity’s collective vibration.
Coming cataclysms will radically alter the
population and surface of the planet. Certain
chosen earthlings who are advanced spiritually
will be taken up just before the disasters. Oth¬
ers will be left on the surface for a time as they
help suffering Earth people. Eventually, spiri¬
tually unenlightened but otherwise harmless
persons will be taken up and resettled on un¬
inhabited planets, while the truly evil will be
left on Earth. Most, though not all, will per¬
ish. All of this, Artemis said in 1981, will hap¬
pen “sooner than most people think” (Beck-
ley, 1989).

Further Reading

Beckley, Timothy Green, 1989. Psychic and UFO
Revelations in the Last Days. New Brunswick, NJ:
Inner Light Publications.

Ascended Masters

Ascended Masters are human beings who
achieved pure spiritual enlightenment before
their deaths. Along with that enlightenment,
they attained mystical powers that set them
apart from their fellows. When their physical
bodies died (“ascended”), they continued to
oversee the affairs of humanity. They channel
wisdom to those who will listen to them.

One source observes, “It is important for
students and people to come to realize that all
Ascended Beings are Real, Tangible Beings.
Their Bodies are not physical but They can
make them as tangible as our physical bodies
are” (“Ascended Masters”). The Great White
Brotherhood, a spiritual council that exists in
the supernatural realm, consists of Ascended
Masters.

Further Reading

“Ascended Masters.” http://www.ascension-research.
org/masters.html.

Ashtar

Ashtar is among the most popular and most
powerfully positioned of all channeling enti¬
ties. As (according to most contactees who
have dealings with him) head of the Ashtar
Command he is, in the words of his sponsor

Lord Michael, “Supreme Director in charge of
all of the Spiritual program” for Earth. From
his giant starship in Earth’s general vicinity he
gives orders to millions of extraterrestrial and
inter-dimensional beings who are trying to re¬
form and enlighten earthlings. His home is in
the etheric realm, which means that to visit
our physical universe he must descend the vi¬
bratory scale, or we would not be able to hear
or perceive him at all. He explains his mission
thus:

“ We have come to fulfill the destiny of this
planet, which is to experience a short period of
‘cleansing’ and then to usher in a NEW
GOLDEN AGE OF LIGHT. We are here to lift
off the surface, .. . during this period of cleans¬
ing, those souls who are walking in the Light on
the Earth. . . . The souls of Light are you people
of Earth who have lived according to universal
truths and have put the concerns of others be¬
fore your own. . . . The short period of cleans¬
ing the planet is LMMINENT—EVEN THE
MIDNIGHT HOUR!" (Tuella, 1989).

Officially, Ashtar came into the world on
July 18, 1952, when George W. Van Tassel, an
early and influential contactee from southern
California, took a telepathic message from
“Portia, 712th projection, 16th wave, realms
of Schare” (pronounced Share-ee). Portia pro¬
nounced, “Approaching your solar system is a
ventla [spaceship] with our chief aboard, com¬
mander of the station Schare in charge of the
first four sectors. . . . We are waiting here at
72,000 miles above you to welcome our chief,
who will be entering this solar system for the
first time.” Soon the chief spoke, introducing
himself with—“Ashtar, commandant quadra
sector, patrol section Schare, all projections,
all waves.” He addressed an emerging concern
among occultists of the period: that the hy¬
drogen bomb, then in development, would
set off a chain reaction that would destroy the
planet. Ashtar warned that if scientists did not
stop their work on the device immediately,
“we shall eliminate all projects connected with
such” (Van Tassel, 1952).

Though Van Tassel would claim contacts
with many other curiously named other-

28 Ashtar

worldly entities, only Ashtar would make a
wider mark in the contactee subculture. Before
long other channelers were receiving material
from Ashtar as well as his associates, such as
Sananda (Jesus), Korton, Soltec, Athena,
Monka, and others. So many Ashtar channel¬
ings occurred that soon Ashtar was warning
some communicants that evil astral entities
were impersonating him. He was also forced to
deny allegations that he was “some form of
giant mechanical brain” (Constable, 1958). In
the 1970s and beyond, as fundamental Chris¬
tians began writing books on UFOs, Ashtar
was represented as a servant of Satan.

Though to nearly all who experienced him,
Ashtar existed only as a disembodied voice, a
very few claimed to have seen him. One
woman, Adele Darrah, even alleged that she
saw him before she had ever heard of an
Ashtar. One night in the early 1960s, after she
had gone to bed, Darrah found herself sud¬
denly awake and in her downstairs living
room, where a striking-looking stranger stood
in front of the fireplace. He was tall, slim, and
erect and was wearing a uniform with a high
collar. “His eyebrows were slim and delicate,
the nose was thin, the mouth was rather
straight, the lips thin,” she reported. “His eyes
were brilliant and penetrating, almond-
shaped with a slight oriental appearance.”
When she introduced herself, he smiled and
indicated that he already knew her name.
Then he squared his shoulders and an¬
nounced, “I am Ashtar.” Everything that fol¬
lowed faded from her memory, and only a few
years later, Darrah claimed, would she learn
that others knew such an entity.

Typically, however, contactees and chan¬
nelers report seeing Ashtar in psychic percep¬
tion or in out-of-body journeys to his star-
ship. Perhaps not surprisingly, descriptions
vary, some calling him dark, others fair, some
estimating his height at less than six feet, oth¬
ers at more than seven.

In the 1980s and 1990s, more and more of
the messages from Ashtar and his associates
focused on the “Ascension,” the removal of
“Lightworkers”—those doing the Command’s

work on Earth, many if not all of them extra¬
terrestrials in earlier incarnations—from
Earth just prior to the Cleansing (the natural
and other catastrophes that will afflict Earth,
killing millions, before the space people land).
The failure of either the Ascension or the
Cleansing to take place discouraged many fol¬
lowers. In a channeling in the 1990s, Ashtar
explained that, in fact, the Lightworkers had
effected huge changes, which, though now in¬
visible, will become apparent in due course.
In the meantime, according to Ashtar associ¬
ate Soltec, the human race will continue to be
educated subtly through dreams, popular cul¬
ture, and growing numbers of spacecraft
sightings. Unfortunately, “there will be many
ones who will confuse us with negative ET
encounters. Indeed, the greys will take advan¬
tage of the opportunity to confuse the popu¬
lace and attempt to tarnish our image. Ones
must be made aware of the distinction be¬
tween the ships of Light and the ships of ab¬
duction” (Soltec, n.d.).

In 2000, Brianna Wettlaufer of Van Tassel’s
organization, the Ministry of Universal Wis¬
dom (Van Tassel himself died in 1978), put
out a statement that sought to separate Ashtar
from the Ashtar Command. Van Tassel, it was
said, communicated only with Ashtar; the
Ashtar Command, on the other hand, was a
concept promulgated by another early con¬
tactee, Robert Short. He and Van Tassel had
been friends but parted company when Short
decided to make Ashtar’s communications
“commercial and mainstream, in order for
personal notoriety, not for a truth to the pub -
lie.” Wettlaufer insisted that “Ashtar is not a
metaphysical philosopher or rambler” and
moreover, he cannot be reached via channel¬
ing (though Van Tassel’s own method of com¬
munication seemed indistinguishable from
channeling to most observers). The statement
goes on, “The Ashtar of Ashtar Command is a
real personality... a clone of the original
Ashtar, and is dangerous... a disobedient
angel” (Wettlaufer, 2000).

The name “Ashtar” may owe its inspiration
to a nineteenth-century work, Oahspe, the

Asmitor 29

product of alleged angelic dictation to New
York occultist John Ballou Newbrough. In
this complex alternative history of Earth and
the universe, “ashars” are guardian angels who
sail the cosmos in etheric ships. Oahspe had a
wide readership among devotees of the early
contactee movement.

See Also: Athena; Contactees; Korton; Monka;
Portia; Sananda; Van Tassel, George W.

Further Reading

Alnor, William M., 1992. UFOs in the New Age: Ex -
traterrestrial Messages and the Truth of Scripture.
Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House.

James, Trevor [pseud, of Trevor James Constable],
1958. They Live in the Sky Los Angeles: New Age
Publishing Company.

King, Beti, 1976. Diary from Outer Space. Mojave,
CA: self-published.

-, 1976. A Psychics True Story. Mojave, CA:

self-published.

Soltec, n.d. ‘Ashtar Command and Popular Culture.”
http: //www.eagleswings .com/au/soltec 1. html

Tuella [pseud, of Thelma B. Turrell], ed., 1989.
Ashtar: A Tribute. Third edition. Salt Lake City,
UT: Guardian Action Publications.

Van Tassel, George W., 1952. I Rode a Flying Saucer!
The Mystery of Flying Saucers Revealed. Los Ange¬
les: New Age Publishing Company.

Wettlaufer, Brianna, 2000. “A Brief Background be¬
tween Ashtar and Ashtar Command.” http://www.
georgevantassel.com/Pages/005.1 ashtar.html

Asmitor

In Revelation: The Divine Fire (1973) Brad
Steiger reports a story related to him by
Robert Shell of Roanoke, Virginia, concern¬
ing a malevolent entity that attached itself to a
young man experimenting with psychedelic
drugs. The being called itself “Asmitor” even
as it explained that this was not precisely its
name, but the closest approximation that the
human voice could manage to pronounce.

Shell said that he met Mark while both
were living in an apartment building in Rich¬
mond, Virginia, in 1969. Shell and a friend
were pursuing an interest in ritual magic.
Mark, then eighteen years old, expressed no
interest in such things; his interests were in
electronics and occasional use of hallucino¬
gens. Thus, Shell was surprised and skeptical

when Mark began speaking of contact he was
beginning to experience with what he called
an “entity” that gave him certain things in ex¬
change for periodic occupation of his physical
body. Around this time Shell and his wife ob¬
served poltergeistlike manifestations in their
apartment.

These experiences led Shell to be more
open-minded about Mark’s claims. Mark con¬
fided that the entity was a multidimensional
energy being. It extended across the entire
universe, though by force of will it could
focus on a particular place for purposes of
communication. It never explained why it
sought such contacts, but Mark came to sense
that it had a deep interest—again for reasons
it would not clearly divulge—in this level of
reality. As time went by, Mark came to see the
entity, now calling itself Asmitor, as evil and
deceitful. It also would not let him alone and
more or less possessed him.

Before that happened, however, Shell ac¬
cepted Mark’s endorsement of Asmitor’s es¬
sentially benign intentions and asked for a
personal contact. One night he underwent a
frightening experience in which he awoke
with a crushing sensation on his chest, which
he interpreted as a visitation from Asmitor,
though the sensations he describes are classic
characteristics of sleep paralysis. The next day
Mark, passing on Asmitor’s words, told Shell
that Asmitor had found him—Shell—unfit
for contact.

Asmitor claimed to be in conflict with an¬
other entity, with the climactic battle immi¬
nent. The other entity was just as malevolent
as Asmitor, but the two were deadly enemies,
their conflict having been set up, for in¬
scrutable reasons, by a “higher ruling force.”
Mark was to create a “landmark”—a “specific,
easily accessible point for it to hold onto”—
consisting of a pentagram with symbols
drawn around it.

Though Asmitor had promised Mark com¬
plete physical protection, the young man
learned otherwise when he was arrested for
possession of LSD and marijuana and sen¬
tenced to jail. After serving three months, he

30 Athena

was released. By this time Shell had moved to
another city and out of direct contact with
Mark, though the two exchanged some letters
and talked on the phone on occasion. Mark
expressed growing desperation about his
plight. He was certain now that he could es¬
cape Asmitor’s grip only by destroying him¬
self. Thus, Shell said, “It came as a shock, but
not really a surprise, to hear from a mutual
friend . . . that on April 1, 1970, Mark had
committed suicide.”

Shell noted that not long afterward, while
perusing a book of medieval magic, he came
upon the name Asmitor, though he could not
tell Steiger exactly where. “I am convinced
that Mark had never read this book,” he re¬
marked, “and I am also convinced that Mark
did not simply make up this name.” Steiger,
on the other hand, suspected that the tragic
episode came out of “paranoid schizophrenia,
or some other illness.”

Further Reading

Steiger, Brad, 1973. Revelation: The Divine Fire. En¬
glewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Athena

In Project Alert, a self-published monograph,
an Indiana contactee known as Tuieta provides
a transcript of a three-day conference held at
“the Tectonic base that is on planet Earth.”
The gathering brought together “specific com¬
manders . . . under the immediate supervision,
guidance, and counsel of Commander Ash-
tar.” Among the speakers, who included such
familiar figures in the Ashtar Command as
Korton, Monka, and Soltec, was the hereto¬
fore obscure Commander Athena. Athena
spoke of the role of Earth women in the com¬
ing “period of great tribulation.” During this
crisis many people would not survive. The
woman most likely to get through the cata¬
strophic Earth changes, according to Athena,
was one who recognized “the importance of
providing for loved ones and providing for
those that need nurturing and counsel.”

Athena is described as a small, reddish-gold¬
haired, beautiful woman with deep blue eyes.

Maren Jensen as space commander Athena in the 1978—
1979ABC TV series Battlestar Galactica (Photofest)

She exudes “great love and great compassion
and tremendous strength.” Her name, coinci¬
dentally or otherwise, is the same as that of the
Greek goddess of wisdom, the arts, and war¬
fare. Athena was also the name of a space com¬
mander in the television series Battlestar Galac -
tica, which aired on ABC in 1978 and 1979.

According to the late Thelma B. Turrell
(who was also known as Tuella, a name given
her by the Ashtar Command), “Athena is the
twin flame of Ashtar. He has said to me that
he could turn over the whole command to her
and no one would even miss him” (Beckley,
1989).

See Also: Ashtar; Contactees; Korton; Monka

Further Reading

Beckley, Timothy Green, 1989. Psychic and UFO
Revelations in the Last Days. New Brunswick, NJ:
Inner Light Publications.

Tuieta, 1986. Project Alert. Fort Wayne, IN: Portals
of Light.

Atlantis 31

Atlantis

Atlantis, the fabled lost continent, almost cer¬
tainly never existed in the real world, but it has
long captured the imaginations of human be¬
ings. A vast literature—scholars estimate con¬
servatively that more than two thousand books
address the subject—has tackled Atlantis from
a wide range of perspectives. Some writers
have sought to establish, with what most
scholars hold to be inconclusive results, that
the legend arose from the mythologizing of a
real event, though almost every theorist has
proposed a different one. Most writing, how¬
ever, has taken an alternative-history approach,
paying little heed to mainstream archaeology,
history, and science, while taking Atlantis into
the realm of unfettered speculation.

The legend of Atlantis begins in two works,
Timaeus and Critias (written circa 355 B.C.),
by the great Greek philosopher Plato. As in
his earlier work The Republic, Plato wrote
these works as dialogues among four wise
men, including Plato’s teacher Socrates. In the
course of a long discourse on philosophical is¬
sues of various kinds, Critias, a historian and

Plato’s great-grandfather, tells of a story that
he ascribes to his grandfather, who heard it
from his father. Around 600 B.C., while trav¬
eling in Europe, Solon (a historical figure re¬
membered for his legal and poetic genius)
learned of a great civilization that existed nine
thousand years earlier. It was located in the
Atlantic Ocean beyond the Pillars of Hercules
(the present-day Straits of Gibraltar) on an is¬
land larger than North Africa and Asia com¬
bined. According to Solon’s informant, an
Egyptian priest, Atlantis had grown arrogant
and warlike. It ruled many other islands and
parts of what is now Europe. But when it at¬
tacked Athens and other Greek city-states,
those communities joined forces to repel the
invaders and drive them back to Atlantis, free¬
ing other islands from Atlantis’s tyranny in the
process. But when the battle was brought to
Atlantis’s own shores, cataclysmic earthquakes
and floods destroyed the island continent over
a single night and day. The Greek soldiers
died along with the Atlanteans, and Atlantis
sank to the bottom of the ocean, to rise no
more.

Illustration of the location of the empire of Atlantis from Atlantis: The Antediluvian World by Ignatius Donnelly, 1882
(Library of Congress)

32 Atlantis

That is not all the dialogues have to say,
however. Most of the discussion, much of it
intricately detailed, describes a civilization
that was nearly perfect before pride corrupted
it. Atlantis is supposed to be the place of
model governance. In its prime it operated by
the principles set forth in The Republic.

No other ancient document contains an in¬
dependent treatment of Atlantis. All refer¬
ences to the lost continent cite Plato as the
source. Some accept Plato’s account as histori¬
cal, while others see it as an allegory never
meant to be taken literally. Plato’s own stu¬
dent Aristotle took the latter view.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth cen¬
turies, as European explorers found their way
to the Americas, several writers, most promi¬
nently Sir Francis Bacon (1551-1626), re¬
vived the myth of Atlantis and theorized that
its remains could be found in the New World.
That would be only the beginning of a new
round of speculation. “At one time or an¬
other,” a modern chronicler of the legend ob¬
serves, “Atlantis has been located in the Arctic,
Nigeria, the Caucasus, the Crimea, North
Africa, the Sahara, Malta, Spain, central
France, Belgium, the Netherlands, the North
Sea, the Bahamas, and various other locations
in North and South America” (Ellis, 1998).

Among the most influential books ever
written on the subject, Atlantis: The Antedilu -
vian World (1882) was the creation of a for¬
mer Minnesota congressman named Ignatius
Donnelly (1831-1901). Donnelly surveyed
what he presented as evidence from such dis¬
ciplines as archaeology, geology, biology, lin¬
guistics, history, and folklore to argue vigor¬
ously for the proposition that Atlantis not
only existed but was the place where human
beings became civilized. Atlantis sent its peo¬
ple all over the world and seeded the earth.
The great gods and goddesses of the ancient
world were based on the leaders and heroes of
Atlantis; worldwide legends of a mighty del¬
uge owe their origins to dim memories of the
catastrophe that overwhelmed Atlantis. The
historical civilization influenced most directly
by Atlantis was ancient Egypt.

These revelations sparked international
interest, and Donnelly’s book went through
many printings. For a time even some rep¬
utable scientists were willing to consider the
possibility that the legend was true, after all.
Indeed, Donnelly was elected to the Ameri¬
can Association for the Advancement of Sci¬
ence. Before long, however, as critics exposed
the book’s errors, exaggerations, and assorted
scholarly shortcomings, belief in Atlantis
moved to the occult fringes, to be champi¬
oned by the likes of Theosophy founder He¬
lena Petrovna Blavatsky and other philoso¬
phers of the esoteric. Before the end of the
nineteenth century, a growing body of occult
literature attested that Atlantis was ad¬
vanced, not just by the standards of their
time, but by modern times as well; it pos¬
sessed a super science that, among other
marvelous accomplishments, had invented
airplanes and television.

The Scottish folklorist and occultist Lewis
Spence, who took a relatively more conserva¬
tive approach, wrote five books on Atlantis
between 1924 and 1943, citing Donnelly and
his methodology as his principal inspiration.
Bowing to the consensus view of historians
and archaeologists, who held that human be¬
ings were living in caves nine thousand years
before Plato’s time, Spence held that Atlantis
had existed nine hundred years before Plato.
Meanwhile, allegations, rumors, and outright
hoaxes of archaeological “discoveries” of At-
lantean artifacts filled the popular press and
kept the “mystery” alive.

The much-circulated channelings of Edgar
Cayce (1877-1945), called the “sleeping
prophet” because of the state of consciousness
in which he vocalized his psychic readings,
often concerned Atlantis. Many who came to
him for psychic guidance learned that they had
been Atlanteans in previous lives. In Cayce’s
comprehensive re-envisioning of the lost con¬
tinent, Atlantis was essentially where Plato had
placed it: between the Gulf of Mexico and the
Mediterranean. Unlike Plato’s, Cayce’s Atlantis
was as advanced as mid-twentieth-century
America, and in a number of ways more ad-

Atlantis 33

vanced. The Atlanteans, according to Cayce, at
first were spiritual beings. They eventually
evolved into flesh-and-blood ones. Their soci¬
ety came undone when civil war erupted. A
combination of natural disasters and the mis¬
use of Atlantean technology caused the conti¬
nent to break apart and sink under the ocean
waters. But by the late 1960s, Cayce predicted,
the western part of Atlantis would reemerge in
the vicinity of Bimini, in the Bahamas. When
the time came, more than two decades after
Cayce’s death, several expeditions searched for
Atlantean ruins in the area, at one point trum¬
peting what proved to be natural undersea
rock formations as roadways and architectural
artifacts.

Atlantis has been thoroughly absorbed
into fringe belief, theory, and practice. In the
age of flying saucers, some writers tied UFOs
to an extraterrestrial technology that the At¬
lanteans knew because of their frequent inter¬
actions with friendly space people. Hollow-
earth enthusiasts believed that Atlantean
machinery and even Atlanteans themselves
could be found inside certain cavern en¬
trances around the world. New Age channel-
ers communicated with hundreds, perhaps
thousands, of disembodied Atlanteans. A
century of occult lore holds that Atlanteans
and Lemurians (from Lemuria, the Pacific
equivalent of Atlantis) maintain colonies in¬
side Mount Shasta on the California-Oregon
border.

With the rise of the Internet, web sites de¬
voted to Atlantis and related materials have
proliferated. One such site, run by the
Hawaii-based Department of Interplanetary
Affairs, provides a densely detailed overview
of the Atlantis myth as it had evolved by the
end of the twentieth century. In this version,
Atlantis was literally a golden civilization in
which gold was so plentiful that it was as
common as steel is today in construction and
infrastructure. The Atlanteans traveled
around the globe in fantastic flying ships.
These same ships took them to other planets,
including Mars, where they left evidence of
their presence in a gigantic structure (the

“Mars face”) and a number of pyramids on
the Martian surface. The moon was also a
colony of Atlantis. Modern-day astronauts
found ruins of walls and roads there but were
silenced by a government determined to keep
the truth about Atlantis from the public.

The Department of Interplanetary Affairs
describes Atlanteans as living lives of leisure
and prosperity, while a “national work force of
robots, androids, and humanoids from ge¬
netic engineering” did the empires heavy lift¬
ing. “Atlantean science then fostered some
bizarre genetic creations—they discovered
ways to cross-breed species to create mermaids
and mermen, Cyclops, unicorns and other
creatures.” That same genetic engineering
gave Atlanteans huge size and great strength.

It all came crashing down, in both a literal
and figurative sense, when the population
surrendered itself to the pursuit of hedonistic
pleasures; in the meantime, evil Atlantean
scientists cracked the secret of mind control
and tried to dominate the world and even the
solar system. In due course the abuse of both
psychic and material technology led to the
geophysical cataclysms that destroyed the
continent.

But that was not all. According to the De¬
partment of Interplanetary Affairs, Atlantis’s
problems generated a world war that spread
into space. Atomic blasts decimated the moon
colony. Antimatter rays vaporized nearly all of
Atlantis’s buildings and cities. “It is said,” the
department reports, “that one of these anti¬
matter rays is still operating in the Bermuda
Triangle and has been causing planes and
ships to disappear. Today that ray is out of
control” (Omar, 1996).

For all the allure of the Atlantis legend,
nothing of substance has come to light in the
nearly twenty-five centuries that separate us
from Plato’s account to lead reasonable people
to conclude that such a lost continent ever
graced the Atlantic Ocean. In Imagining At -
lantis (1998) Richard Ellis writes, “Plato’s de¬
scription of Atlantis was of a rich and power¬
ful society that was swallowed up by the sea in
a great cataclysm, and every remnant of it de-

34 Aura Rhanes

stroyed. Like the Iliad and the Odyssey, it has
managed to survive for more than two millen¬
nia. But unlike Homer’s epic poems, Plato’s
tale—rarely considered an important part of
his voluminous output—has not only sur¬
vived as a demonstration of the storyteller’s
art, but also has become a part of our own
mythology.”

See Also: Bermuda Triangle; Channelings; Hollow
earth; Lemuria; Mount Shasta; Shaver mystery

Further Reading

Cayce, Edgar, 1968. Edgar Cayce on Atlantis. New
York: Paperback Library.

De Camp, L. Sprague, 1970. Lost Continents: The At -
lantis Theme in History, Science, and Literature.
New York: Dover Publications.

Donnelly, Ignatius, 1882. Atlantis: The Antediluvian
World. New York: Harper.

Ellis, Richard, 1998. Imagining Atlantis. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf.

Omar, Steve, 1996. “History of the Golden Ages,
Volume I.” http://www.nii.net/-obie/history-
gold.htm

Spence, Lewis, 1924. The Problem of Atlantis. Lon¬
don: Rider.

Steiner, Rudolf, 1968. Cosmic Memory: Prehistory of
Earth and Man. West Nyack, NY: Paperback Li¬
brary.

Aura Rhanes

Heavy-equipment operator Truman Bethu-
rum encountered the beautiful Aura Rhanes,
captain of a “scow” (spaceship) from the idyl¬
lic planet Clarion, on the other side of the
moon, in the early morning hours of July 28,
1952, in the Nevada desert. When male crew
members ushered him inside the craft, parked
in an area known locally as Mormon Mesa,
Bethurum saw Aura Rhanes for the first time.
She was small, had an olive complexion, and
wore a black and red beret. The two engaged
in an extended conversation, during which
they asked each other about their respective
worlds. The spacewoman spoke, Bethurum
would write, “in a swinging, rhythmic tone of
voice” (Bethurum, 1954). When daylight
came, Bethurum was asked to leave, but they
were to meet again. There were eleven meet¬
ings between July and November alone. Only
on the occasion of the third meeting, on Au¬

gust 18, did she reveal her name. Once he
spotted her walking down a street in Las
Vegas, but she refused to speak with him, ap¬
parently not wanting to be recognized.

Bethurum participated actively in the
1950s contact movement. Most outside ob¬
servers believed him to be a hoaxer. His wife,
Mary, apparently felt otherwise. She divorced
him in 1956 on the grounds that he was hav¬
ing sexual relations with Aura Rhanes. As with
many other contactees from that period, it is
impossible to judge just what Bethurum be¬
lieved or did not believe about his reported in¬
teractions with extraterrestrials. A privately
kept scrapbook published after his death car¬
ried a poem titled “Third Visit to Mormon
Mesa Aug 18 1952” commemorating the
meeting in which Aura Rhanes let him touch
her to convince him of her physical reality.
Other items in the scrapbook consist of clip¬
pings about himself and of materials lending
support to his story. Though a skeptic of con¬
tact claims, British writer Hilary Evans re¬
marks that “we still have no yardstick whereby
we can separate contactees into ‘genuine’ and
‘fake’, and until we can establish some such
criteria, we must provisionally extend the ben¬
efit of the doubt even to poor old Truman
Bethurum and cute little Aura Rhanes from
the far side of the Sun” (Evans, 1987).

Further Reading

Bethurum, Truman, 1954. Aboard a Flying Saucer.
Los Angeles: DeVorss and Company.

-, 1982. Personal Scrapbook. Scotia, NY: Arc-

turus Book Service.

Evans, Hilary, 1987. Gods, Spirits, Cosmic Guardians.
Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, England:
Aquarian Press.

Aurora Martian

An article in the April 19, 1897, edition of the
Dallas Morning News told an extraordinary
story in a very few words. Datelined Aurora,
forty-five miles northwest of Dallas, it related
that a mysterious “airship” had crashed into a
local windmill at 6 A.M. two days earlier. On
colliding, “it went to pieces with a terrific ex-

Ausso 35

plosion, scattering debris over several acres of
ground, wrecking the windmill and tower and
destroying [windmill owner Judge J. S. Proc¬
tor’s] flower garden,” correspondent S. E.
Haydon wrote. Haydon went on to report
that citizens who rushed to the scene found
the body of a “badly disfigured” being whom
one observer identified as a Martian. The
story concluded with the news that the fu¬
neral would occur the next day.

The story appeared in the midst of a wave
of what today would be called UFO sightings,
which had begun in northern California in
November 1896 and moved eastward by the
following spring, when newspapers all over
America were full of strange and often fanciful
stories. The Morning News carried no follow¬
up, suggesting it did not take the tale seriously
enough to dispatch one of its own reporters to
the site. In any event, it wasn’t the only wild
airship yarn the paper was carrying. The day
before it printed the Aurora story, it recounted
a Kaufman County sighting of a “Chinese fly¬
ing dragon. . . . The legs were the propellers.”
At Farmersville, the paper stated, the occu¬
pants of an airship sang “Nearer My God to
Thee” and distributed temperance tracts.

The episode of the Aurora Martian was for¬
gotten until the 1960s, when public fascina¬
tion with UFOs led to research into the phe¬
nomenon’s early history. In 1966 a Houston
Post writer revived the Aurora story, which he
apparently took at face value. Investigators
went to the tiny town and spoke with elderly
residents. Most, if they remembered the
episode at all, dismissed it as a joke. One said
that FFaydon had concocted the tale to draw
attention to the town, which in the 1890s was
suffering a serious decline in its fortunes.

Still, rumors persisted that a grave in the
Aurora cemetery housed an unknown occu¬
pant, perhaps the Martian. As late as 1973,
ufologist FFayden FFewes was trying to per¬
suade local people to let him exhume the
grave, a notion that Aurora’s residents vehe¬
mently rejected. Confusing matters further,
two elderly residents were now claiming that
they had known persons who saw the wreck¬

age. Analysis of metal samples allegedly of the
airship, however, proved it was an aluminum
alloy of fairly recent vintage.

There is no reason to believe that a Martian
died in Aurora, Texas, late in the nineteenth
century. Still, the legend inspired the 1985
film Aurora Encounter, a low-budget ET set in
the Old West, and it remains one of Texas’s
more exotic folktales.

See Also: Allingham’s Martian; Brown’s Martians;
Dead extraterrestrials; Dentons’s Martians and
Venusians; Hopkins’s Martians; Khauga; Martian
bees; Mince-Pie Martians; Monka; Muller’s Mar¬
tians; Shaw’s Martians; Smead’s Martians;
Wilcox’s Martians

Further Reading

Chariton, Wallace O., 1991. The Great Texas Airship
Mystery. Plano, TX: Wordware Publishing.

Cohen, Daniel, 1981. The Great Airship Mystery: A
UFO of the 1890s. New York: Dodd, Mead and
Company.

Masquelette, Frank, 1966. “Claims Made of UFO
Evidence.” Houston Post (June 13).

Randle, Kevin D., 1995. A History of UFO Crashes.
New York: Avon Books.

Simmons, H. Michael, 1985. “Once upon a Time in
the West.” Magonia 43 (July): 3-11.

Ausso

Ausso is an extraterrestrial allegedly encoun¬
tered by Wyoming elk hunter E. Carl Hig¬
don, Jr., on October 25, 1974. Five hours
after he called for help, authorities found Hig¬
don inside his pickup in an area inaccessible
to all but four-wheel-drive vehicles. Taken to a
nearby hospital, the shaken and disoriented
Higdon claimed to have encountered a
strange being named Ausso who flew him in a
spaceship to another world where he was
taken to a mushroom-shaped tower. While in¬
side the tower, Higdon saw what looked like
normal human beings, who paid no attention
to him. Ausso explained that he was a
hunter/explorer, and he and his people were
visiting Earth to collect animals for breeding
purposes and for food. Soon Higdon was
flown back to Earth and put back in his truck.

Polygraph tests given Higdon in 1975 and
1976 produced ambiguous results, but psy¬
chological inventories suggested that he did

36 Avinash

not suffer from mental illness. Higdon did
not seek to exploit his alleged experience and
soon returned to private life. University of
Wyoming psychologist and ufologist R. Leo
Sprinkle, who investigated the incident,
judged Higdon sincere, even if it had proved
impossible to establish the “validity of the
UFO experience” (Sprinkle, 1979).

Further Reading

Gansberg, Judith M., and Alan L. Gansberg, 1980.
Direct Encounters: The Personal Histories of UFO
Abductees. New York: Walker and Company.

Sprinkle, R. Leo, 1979. “Investigation of the Alleged
UFO Experience of Carl Higdon.” In Richard F.
Haines, ed. UFO Phenomena and the Behavioral
Scientist, 225-357. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow
Press.

Avinash

On March 3, 1986, an extraterrestrial spirit
entered the body of a man identified only as
John. Till then, John, a channeler from Belle¬
vue, Washington, had been communicating
with another entity, Elihu. However, on this
date the space being Avinash took control of
John’s consciousness. Soon thereafter, Avinash
moved to Hawaii with another walk-in (a per¬
son under the control of a spirit or other-in¬
telligence that has claimed his or her body), a
woman named Alezsha. In due course, a third
walk-in, Ashtridia, joined them. Avinash,
however, did the channeling, teaching a doc¬
trine that said essentially that conscious could
affect reality; thus, both personal and societal
reality can be altered if one rearranges one’s
perceptions.

Overseen by an immense extradimensional
spaceship, the three moved to the popular
New Age community, Sedona, Arizona, where
Avinash met Arthea, and the two became a
couple. They were brought together, they be¬
lieved, by divine guidance. The walk-in group
expanded to a dozen members in 1987, but as
most members eventually moved away, only
three remained by the end of the year. Those
three, Avinash, Arthea, and Alana, began to
host new occupying entities that would mani¬
fest for a time, then depart. While the entities

occupied them, the humans would take on
their names. Other members who later came
into the group, now calling itself Extraterres¬
trial Earth Mission, experienced the same (to
outsiders) bewildering change of names and
identities.

Extraterrestrial Earth Mission became an
international movement. Outside the United
States, it was particularly successful in Aus¬
tralia. The organization’s headquarters are
now in Hawaii.

Further Reading

Melton, J. Gordon, 1996. Encyclopedia of American
Religions. Fifth edition. Detroit, MI: Gale Re¬
search.

Ayala

Ayala is a deva, a divine energy, who claims
to represent the animal kingdom and, be¬
yond that, “All That Is.” She appeared first
on February 2, 1994, to two Sedona, Ari¬
zona, New Age women, both of them chan-
nelers. Subsequently, she directed other
devas, including Shiva and Gaia, who com¬
municated psychically on the subject of
human-animal relations.

Ayala made her presence known when two
psychics, Toraya (Carly) Ayres and a woman
identified only as Sarafina, happened to be en¬
gaged in a discussion of nature spirits. Sud¬
denly, Sarafina started shivering and breathing
oddly. Then she lapsed into a trance, during
which she voiced animal-like sounds. Soon
Ayala was speaking through her, proposing
that she and the two women work together on
a project. The project required Ayres to be at
her computer at three o’clock each afternoon
to write down the messages as they came
forth. When Ayres protested that this was not
a good time for her in terms of her job re¬
sponsibilities, Ayala insisted that that was the
only time the communication could be ef¬
fected, owing to the vagaries of planetary vi¬
brations. She said, “We will meet you in your
dreamtime, and you will be more aware of
what your role is in the inter-planetary con-

Azelia 37

nection with All That Is. . . . There is an en¬
ergy that needs to form. We have to contact
all the devas, and it is not always up to us just
which time we can do this.”

For the next two days Ayala communicated
with Ayres before relinquishing her spot to
another entity, Shiva, “the blood, the muscle,
fur, bone, and spirit of animals.” Ayala told
Ayres that animals are evolving spirits just as
human beings are. Once love and trust had
existed between people and animals. Then the
ice ages came, and animals became wild, and
humans began using them for food. Then hu¬
mans started mistreating animals in all kinds
of other ways, and they also abused nature
generally. Even so, after enduring thousands
of years of cruelty, animals continue to love
humans, “whether in this dimension or any
other.” Humans and animals will be recon¬
ciled during this time of transition, when peo¬
ple are beginning the process that will take
them out of the third—physical—dimension
into higher dimensions.

In the meantime, Ayala urged human be¬
ings to communicate through meditation
with animal devas. For example, someone
having trouble with ants should visualize the
ant deva and express a polite request, first
stressing reverence for ants and all they do for
the world, then asking the ants to leave the
building. If human beings interact with ani¬
mals in this fashion, there will be no need for
environment-damaging poisons or needless
slaughter of wild creatures.

Further Reading

Ayres, Toraya, 1997. “Messages from the Animal
Kingdom.” http://www.spiritweb.org/Spirit/ani-
mal-kingdom-ayres.html

Azelia

Azelia is allegedly the half-extraterrestrial off¬
spring of a Brazilian man and an alien being
with whom he was forced to undergo sexual
intercourse.

Just after returning home from work
around 3 A.M. on June 18, 1979, night

watchman Antonio Carlos Ferreira of Mira-
sol, Sao Paulo, was startled to see a UFO land
outside his house. Three humanoids entered
and paralyzed him with red lights that em¬
anated from boxes they carried on their
chests. They and he floated into the craft,
which eventually took off. Ferreira passed out.
Later he vaguely recalled a mother ship.
Under hypnosis his “memories” grew sharper,
and he saw himself inside a mother ship, look¬
ing at the distant Earth through a porthole.
Approximately twelve different aliens, of two
different but seemingly related types, occu¬
pied the same room. One group consisted of
green-skinned humanoids with smooth dark
hair, thin lips and noses, big eyes, and pointed
ears. The others looked somewhat similar ex¬
cept they had brown skin, thick lips, and red,
crinkly hair. All stood four feet tall and were
clad in white uniforms and gloves. A green
being seemed to be in charge.

Ferreira was taken into another room,
which was dimly lit, and made to lie on a
couch. A naked female walked in and ap¬
proached him as the other beings tried to re¬
move his clothing over the abductee’s resist¬
ance. The woman, about a foot taller than the
others, was essentially human, with a larger
than usual head, thin lips, chocolate skin, and
narrow nose. Her breath was foul. Ferreira in¬
ferred that the beings wanted him to engage
in sex with the woman, a notion he found re¬
pellent. Only after the humanoids subdued
him with a sharp-smelling chemical were they
able to disrobe him. Even then, he continued
to fight, until one of his arms was placed in a
device and the other numbed with an injec¬
tion. The beings spread an oily liquid all over
him, and intercourse followed. At the conclu¬
sion of the act, oil was spread over him again,
and they removed him from the apparatus
and redressed him.

The beings, who addressed him via telepa¬
thy but spoke an “incomprehensible” lan¬
guage to each other, explained that they had
conducted an experiment. He would father a
male child. At some point, after three unspec¬
ified signals had been given, they would re-

38 Azelia

turn to show him his offspring. After giving
him an unpleasant-tasting liquid to quell his
appetite, they took him to the disc that had
brought him to the mother ship and flew him
home. Ferreira suffered from a variety of small
punctures and wounds, and for the next
twenty days he had a burning sensation in his
eyes.

There were other incidents. In one he was
shown the child. In another, on board a UFO,

he saw the child with its mother. On March
30, 1983, one being came to his workplace to
inform him—notwithstanding what they had
told him earlier—that the child was a girl.
Her name was Azelia.

Further Reading

Granchi, Irene, 1984. “Abduction at Mirasol.” Flying
Saucer Review 30, 1 (October): 14-22.

Marsland. Robert, 1983. “Two Claimed Abductions
in Brazil.” The APRO Bulletin (November): 1—2.

Back

In the 1970s, a middle-aged Italian woman,
Germana Grosso, told a Turin newspaper
about her two decades of contact with an
alien race that calls itself Back. She became
aware of its existence twenty years earlier,
when a Tibetan lama’s telepathic messages ex¬
plained to her how she could communicate
with extraterrestrials. Soon the Back were
showing her scenes of themselves and their
lovely home planet, Lioaki. Grosso “saw”
them as images on a sort of mental television
screen. They also informed her that they have
bases on Earth: under the Atlantic Ocean, in
the Gobi Desert, and in a valley in northern
Italy. Earth is nearing disaster, and the Back
are here not to interfere but to warn those
who will listen.

Further Reading

Beckley, Timothy Green, 1989. Psychic and UFO
Revelations in the Last Days. New Brunswick, NJ:
Inner Light Publications.

Bartholomew

The channeling entity Bartholomew first spoke
through Mary-Margaret Moore in the mid-
1970s. She was visiting friends in Socorro,
New Mexico, and undergoing hypnosis in an
effort to relieve back pain. Suddenly, somebody

was speaking through her. For the first year of
their association, Moore feared that Bartholo¬
mew was a dramatic delusion. But over time
she became convinced of his wisdom and
prophetic talents. She came to think of him as
“the energy vortex” or “the higher and wiser
level of energy” (Moore, 1984).

During the New Age boom of the 1980s,
Bartholomew—known for his gentle, kind
manner—was something of a channeling su¬
perstar; his messages of comfort and self-love
were taken to heart. He addressed a wide range
of subjects, from sex and AIDS to prayer and
ego surrender. Before his popularity waned, he
was the subject of two books by Moore.

See Also: Channeling

Further Reading

Moore, Mary-Margaret, 1984. / Come as a Brother: A
Remembrance of Illusions. Taos, NM: High Mesa
Press.

-, 1987. From the Heart of a Gentle Brother.

Taos, NM: High Mesa Press.

Bashar

After two close encounters with large, trian¬
gle-shaped UFOs over the course of one week
in 1973, Californian Darryl Anka—the
brother of singer and composer Paul Anka—
began reading UFO literature in search of an¬
swers. Through his reading about UFOs, he

40 Being of Light

was led to paranormal subjects such as psychic
phenomena, channeling, and spirit communi¬
cation. In 1983, Anka sat in with a channeler
and spent several months absorbing informa¬
tion from discarnate sources. The entity of¬
fered to teach whoever might be interested in
learning how to channel, and Anka decided to
take a course from the channeler. Midway
through the course, Anka first heard from
“Bashar,” who said he was the pilot of the
spaceship Anka had seen a decade earlier.

Bashar claimed to have come from a planet
where all communication is done through
telepathy. The people there do not have names
as such. He called himself Bashar—Arabic for
“commander”—for Anka’s convenience.

After a period of telepathic communication
with Bashar, Anka started to channel—in
other words, to speak with his (or Bashar’s)
voice so that others could hear. In due course,
Anka has become an internationally known
channeler who has taken Bashar (as well as an¬
other entity, Anima) to a variety of nations on
several continents. Bashar has told Anka that
he and his people live on the planet Essassani,
five hundred light years from Earth but in a
different dimension. Bashar was speaking not
just for himself but collectively expressing his
society’s sentiments.

“I have no way of proving ‘Bashar’s’ exis¬
tence to anyone,” Anka concedes. “The most
important thing is that the information, wher¬
ever it’s coming from, had made a difference in
many people’s lives, including my own” (Anka,
n.d.). Anka’s organization, Interplanetary
Connections, coordinates the channeling ef¬
forts and circulates tapes of their recordings.

See Also: Channeling

Further Reading

Anka, Darryl, 1990. Bashar: Blue Print for Change, A
Message for Our Ftiture. Simi Valley, CA: New So¬
lutions Publishing.

“A Message from Darryl Anka,” n.d. http://www.
bashartapes.com/about/message2.html

Being of Light

In his best-selling Life after Life (1976) Ray¬
mond A. Moody writes of near-death experi¬

ences in which persons undergo visionary en¬
counters of what seems to be a kind of heav¬
enly realm. In out-of-body states, according to
testimony Moody collected, percipients ob¬
serve a brilliant light at the end of a tunnel¬
like passage. A telepathic message from the
light asks the observer something like, “Are
you prepared to die?” or “What have you
done with your life?” Immediately afterward,
the dying person experiences a “life review” in
which significant events are rapidly played out
either in order of their occurrence or all at
once in, as Moody puts it, “a display of visual
imagery . . . incredibly vivid and real.”

The percipient feels great love and warmth
emanating from this being, who is usually in¬
terpreted as a divine figure from the individ¬
ual’s own religious tradition. Some see it as
God or Christ, others as an angel. All, how¬
ever, feel that the being is “an emissary, or a
guide.”

Moody characterized the meeting with the
being of light as “perhaps the most incredible
common element in the accounts.” Other re¬
searchers who followed in Moody’s wake,
however, only ambiguously replicated this
particular finding. Kenneth Ring, Margot
Grey, and others found fewer such encounters
in their own samples of people who had un¬
dergone near-death experiences. Many near¬
death accounts described the observation of
an overwhelmingly loving, beautiful light sur¬
rounding them and suffusing the landscape,
but only a small minority of reports had that
light as a “being.” A typical expression of the
light was more like one offered by an English¬
woman who encountered it while her heart
stopped as she was anesthetized during dental
surgery: “The light is brighter than anything
possible to imagine. There are no words to de¬
scribe it, it’s a heavenly light” (Grey, 1985).
Frequently, percipients encounter recogniza¬
ble figures, usually either Christ or deceased
friends and relatives.

Further Reading

Grey, Margot, 1985. Return from Death: An Explo -
ration of the Near-Death Experience. Boston, MA:
Arkana.

Bermuda Triangle 41

Moody, Raymond A., Jr., 1976. Life after Life: The
Investigation of a Phenomenon—Survival of Bodily
Death. Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books.

Ring, Kenneth, 1980. Life at Death: A Scientific In -
vestigation of the Near-Death Experience. New
York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan.

Rogo, D. Scott, 1989. The Return from Silence: A
Study of Near-Death Experiences. Wellingbor¬
ough, Northamptonshire, England: Aquarian
Press.

Bermuda Triangle

The three points of the “Bermuda Triangle” are
Florida, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico. In modem
legend, the Triangle is more than an arbitrary
geometric shape; its three points comprise the
boundaries of a passage into a mysterious oth-
erworld. In the Bermuda Triangle, the laws of
nature are suspended, and ships, planes, and
people disappear without a trace.

A key event in the genesis of the legend was
a real-life tragedy off the coast of Florida on

December 5, 1945. That afternoon, five
Avenger torpedo bombers flew out of the
Naval Air Station at Fort Lauderdale. Flight
19, consisting of fourteen men (thirteen of
them students in the last stage of training),
headed on an eastern course toward the Ba¬
hamas, intending to participate in a practice
bombing at Hens and Chickens Shoals, fifty-
six miles away. After completing that part of
the mission, the aircraft were to proceed to
the east for another sixty-seven miles, turn
north for seventy-three miles, then head west-
southwest for the remaining one hundred
twenty miles back to their home base. Head¬
ing the mission—the only nonstudent—was
the relatively inexperienced Lt. Charles Tay¬
lor, who did not know the area well.

By late afternoon, the planes were lost. Tay¬
lor thought they were flying over the Keys off
Florida’s south coast, and he made a fatal mis-
judgment: he flew north. If he and his men
had been over the Keys, of course, they would

A reward poster at a marina for the yacht Saba Bank, which went missing in the Bermuda Triangle March 10, 1974
(Bettmann/Corbis)

42 Bermuda Triangle

have arrived over land and to safety. Because
they were over the Bahamas, however, flying
northward only put them over the ocean.
With weather conditions deteriorating rap¬
idly, their radio contact with land, already
sporadic, grew ever more difficult. Mean¬
while, amid growing alarm about the planes’
situation, a Dumbo flying boat—a large res¬
cue aircraft built for flight over large bodies of
water—was dispatched from a seaplane base
in Miami and sent on a blind search. Soon
other planes joined it and flew through the
ever more turbulent weather. One of them, a
Martin Mariner, also disappeared.

None of the missing craft were ever found.
The navy’s investigation determined that Tay¬
lor’s confusion about his location, coupled
with dangerous air and sea conditions, caused
the planes under his command to run out of
gas, crash, and get chewed up by the immense
waves the storm had summoned. At 7:50 that
evening, a ship’s crew saw a plane explode. A
search for survivors and bodies was unsuccess¬
ful, though the vessel passed through a large
oil slick from the craft. The navy believed that
the Mariner, a notoriously dangerous aircraft
that was sometimes called a “flying gas
bomb,” had blown up.

If the facts seemed relatively straightfor¬
ward, the legend that would grow in the wake
of Flight 19’s disappearance would be far
more convoluted and fantastic. Flight 19’s
transformation from aviation tragedy to para¬
normal mystery would begin in September
1950, when Associated Press writer E.V.W.
Jones wrote a story about what he called the
“limbo of the lost,” an area bordered by
Florida, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico, where
strange things happened. None, he wrote, was
stranger than the unexplained fate of five
Avengers and one Mariner on the evening of
December 5, 1945.

Soon books and magazines dealing with
UFOs and other anomalous phenomena—
and even mainstream publications such as The
American Legion Magazine —were picking up
the stories, which grew in the telling. The
term “BermudaTriangle” was the invention of

longtime Fortean and paranormal writer Vin¬
cent H. Gaddis; his article on the subject in
the February 1964 issue of Argosy was titled
“The Deadly Bermuda Triangle.” The next
year he incorporated it into a popular book,
Invisible Horizons, on “true mysteries” of the
seas. In Invisible Residents (1970) Ivan T.
Sanderson pointed to the Bermuda Triangle
and comparable places on Earth as evidence
that “OINTS”—Other Intelligences—live
under the oceans, sometimes snatching
planes, ships, and their unlucky crews.

By the 1970s, the groundwork had been
laid for a popular craze. The 1970 release of a
low-budget documentary, The Devil’s Triangle,
stirred interest outside the core audience of
paranormal enthusiasts. Four years later,
Charles Berlitz’s The Bermuda Triangle, a
compilation of lore that had already quietly
circulated for years, became a major best¬
seller. That same year two paperbacks, The
Devil’s Triangle by Richard Winer and Limbo
of the Lost by John Wallace Spencer, fueled
public fascination and speculation. But the
next year, in 1975, Larry Kusche’s in-depth
inquiry into the incidents that underlay the
legend, The Bermuda Triangle Mystery —
Solved, undercut the myth-making by docu¬
menting the prosaic explanations that would
have been apparent if the pro-Triangle writers
had done original research and not simply
rewritten each other’s books. The silence of
the writers whom Kusche criticized effectively
ended the discussion.

Further Reading

Begg, Paul, 1979. Into Thin Air: People Who Disap -
pear. North Pomfret, VT: David and Charles.

Berlitz, Charles, with J. Manson Valentine, 1974.
The Berrmida Triangle. Garden City, NY: Dou¬
bleday and Company.

Eckert, Allan W., 1962. “The Mystery of the Lost
Patrol.” The American Legion Magazine (April):
12-23,39-41.

Gaddis, Vincent H., 1965. Invisible Horizons: True
Mysteries of the Sea. Philadelphia, PA: Chilton
Books.

Kusche, Larry, 1975. The Bermuda Triangle Mys -
tery — Solved. New York: Harper and Row, Pub¬
lishers.

Bethurum, Truman 43

-, 1980. The Disappearance ofFlight 19. New

York: Harper and Row, Publishers.

Sand, George X., 1952. “Sea Mystery at Our Back
Door.” Fate 5, 7 (October): 11-17.

Sanderson, Ivan T., 1970. Invisible Residents: A Dis -
qnisition upon Certain Matters Maritime, and the
Possibility of Intelligent life under the Waters of
This Earth. New York: World Publishing Com¬
pany.

Bethurum, Truman (1898-1969)

Truman Bethurum was one of the stars of the
1950s contactee movement. In a 1953 issue of
Saucers magazine, Bethurum reported that in
the early morning hours of July 28, 1952, he
met eight little men of “Latin” appearance and
was led to a nearby flying saucer. There he
met the captain, a beautiful woman named
Aura Rhanes from Clarion, a planet never vis¬
ible to humans because it is always on the
other side of the moon. Clarion, Bethurum
was informed, is a peaceful, utopian world;
fear of nuclear war on Earth had led the Clar-
ionites to visit and observe earthlings at first

UFO contactee Truman Bethurum (Fortean Picture
library)

Cover fyAboard a Flying Saucer by Truman Bethurum
(Fortean Picture library)

hand. Bethurum claimed further contacts. In
the mid-1950s, Bethurum established a com-
munelike “Sanctuary of Thought” in Prescott,
Arizona. He was a regular at the Giant Rock
Interplanetary Spacecraft Convention and
other contactee venues. He remained active
on the circuit until his death in Landers, Cali¬
fornia, on May 21, 1969.

Two early chroniclers of the contactee sub¬
culture found themselves “favorably and very
deeply impressed with Mr. Bethurum’s
unimaginative sincerity” (Reeve and Reeve,
1957). Another apparent believer was Mary
Bethurum, his first wife, who divorced him
on the grounds that he was engaged in a sex¬
ual relationship with Aura Rhanes. More cyn¬
ical observers, such as Saucer News editor
James W. Moseley, judged Bethurum to be a
liar, motivated by a desire to enrich himself at
believers’ expense. Bethurum refused to un¬
dergo polygraph examination to verify his
story, and when asked to submit, for scientific
analysis, a letter said to have been composed
by Aura Rhanes, he declined, explaining that
“paper on Clarion is made out of just the

44 Bird aliens

same kind of trees we have on earth” (Davis,
1957).

Further Reading

Beckley, Timothy Green, ed., 1970. The People of the
Planet Clarion. Clarksburg, WV: Saucerian
Books.

Bethurum, Truman, 1954. Aboard a Flying Saucer.
Los Angeles: DeVorss and Company.

-, 1953. “I Was Inside a Flying Saucer.”

Saucers 1, 2: 4-5.

Davis, Isabel L., 1957. “Meet the Extraterrestrial.”

Fantastic Universe 8, 5 (November): 31-59.
Moseley, James W, 1961. “Recent News Stories:
1961 Giant Rock Convention Is Disappointing.”
Saucer News 8, 4 (December): 12-13.

Reeve, Bryant, and Helen Reeve, 1957'. Flying Saucer
Pilgrimage. Amherst, WI: Amherst Press.

Bird aliens

A French businessman who insisted on
anonymity confided a strange tale to ufologist
Lyonel Trigano about a decidedly unsettling
encounter on a rural road in Var one dark,
rainy night in November 1962. As he
rounded a curve, he saw, some fifty to sixty
feet ahead of him, a group of figures standing
close to one another in the middle of the
highway. He slowed down, and as he did so,
the group “jerkily” broke into two parts.

“My window was down,” he related, “and I
leaned my head out slightly to see what was
the matter; it was then that I saw beasts, some
kind of bizarre animals, with the heads of
birds, and covered in some sort of plumage,
which were hurling themselves from two sides
toward my car.”

Shocked and frightened, he quickly rolled
up the window and accelerated. After moving
a few hundred feet to what he thought was a
safe distance, he looked back to see these
“nightmarish beings” flapping what looked to
be wings and heading toward a glowing, dark-
blue object hovering over a field on the other
side of the road. The UFO looked like two
upside-down plates placed over each other.

When the creatures or beings reached the
UFO, they “were literally sucked into the un¬
derpart of the machine as if by a whirlwind.”

A dull thudding sound followed, and the
UFO streaked away.

The witness told Trigano that he had said
little to others about the experience for fear of
being thought mad.

See Also: Close encounters of the third kind; Moth-
man

Further Reading

Trigano, Lyonel, 1968. “Strange Encounter in Var.”
Flying Saucer Review 14, 6 (November/Decem¬
ber): 18.

Birmingham’s ark

A bizarre experience is recorded in a fifteen-
page document left by a nineteenth-century
Australian, Frederick William Birmingham,
who lived in Parramatta, New South Wales.
Birmingham was an engineer, surveyor, and
alderman for the city, today a suburb of Syd¬
ney. His tale is reminiscent in some ways of
the flying-saucer contactee tales that would
circulate decades later.

The document came into the hands of a
well-known Australian ufologist, Bill Chalker,
in 1975. Investigating its background, he
traced it to a teacher named Haywood, who
lived at the location where Birmingham
(whose existence and occupation Chalker was
able to verify) was dwelling when his en¬
counter occurred. Haywood, apparently, later
gave it to another family, which had had the
manuscript in its possession since at least the
early 1940s and showed it to Chalker. Chalker
could find no evidence that it was a recent lit¬
erary or historical hoax.

Birmingham wrote that on the evening of
July 25, 1868, “I had a wonderful dream, a vi¬
sion,” while standing under the verandah of
the cottage he rented. Looking up into the sky,
he saw “the Lord Bishop of Sydneys head in
the air looking intently upon me in a frowning
half laughing mood.” As it passed in an east¬
erly direction, it faded out, then reappeared
briefly twice more. “I retraced the course the
head had taken and just in the spot where I
first saw the head I saw an Ark,’” he wrote. As
he stood and studied it, he said aloud to him¬
self, “Well, that is a beautiful vessel.”

Blowing Cave 45

At that moment he heard a voice to his
right and just a little behind him. It said,
“That’s a machine to go through the air.” The
speaker was someone Birmingham thought of
as a “spirit,” looking like a “neutral shade and
the shape of a man.” The ark was brown in
color “with faint, flitting shades of steel
blue . . . like . . . magnified scales on a large
fish.” After a while Birmingham replied to
the spirit. He remarked that the ark looked
more like a ship meant for sailing on water;
in any event, he had never seen anything so
beautiful.

He accepted an invitation to board the ve¬
hicle. He found himself floating through the
air in the spirits company. When they reached
the upper part of the ark, they entered the
“pilot house” by walking down three steep
steps. Inside the barely furnished room was a
table situated two feet from the wall. Some¬
thing like an oilskin covered the table. Birm¬
ingham stood at the rear end, and, not far
away, the spirit held papers in its hand. One
paper was covered with “figures and formu¬
lae.” After Birmingham asked if the papers
were for him, the spirit replied slowly and em¬
phatically, “It is absolutely necessary that you
should know these things, but you can study
them as you go on.”

Birmingham, apparently not knowing
what to say, looked down at his hands. When
he raised his head, the spirit was gone. He
stood alone inside the strange ship. In his
manuscript he recorded this ambiguous con¬
clusion to the encounter; “So I fell, I suppose,
into my usual sleeping state, and waking next
morning deeply impressed with that vision of
the night.”

The following January, at work on an engi¬
neering problem, Birmingham was surprised
to see a formula that he had first seen on the
paper the spirit had shown him. It had to do
with centrifugal pumps.

One day in 1873, at sunset, Birmingham
saw three small “clouds” suddenly appear. Two
“screws” extended from one. Between them, a
shape “like two flat necks on a turtle-shaped
body” came into view, then disappeared, only

to reappear soon afterward. Finally, “the two
big. . . screws folded up like the arms of a
bear and lost their shape in the middle cloud”
(Chalker, 1996).

The manuscript indicates that Birmingham
had become obsessed with the ark and its se¬
crets. He died in 1893, however, without ever
being able to unlock them.

See Also: Contactees

Further Reading

Chalker, Bill, 1996. The Oz Files: The Australian
UFO Story. Potts Point, New South Wales, Aus¬
tralia: Duffy and Snellgrove.

-, 1992. “UFOs in Australia and New Zealand

through 1959.” In Jerome Clark. The Emergence
of a Phenomenon: UFOs from the Beginning
Through 1959—The UFO Encyclopedia, Volume
Tivo, 333-356. Detroit, MI: Omnigraphics.

Blowing Cave

One of the odder stories related to hollow
earth lore is set in Blowing Cave, near Cush¬
man, Arkansas, where a man named George
D. Wight is said to have found a subterranean
civilization and proven the Shaver Mystery.
Though Wight disappeared, his story survives
in a diary he allegedly wrote.

In the 1950s, Wight was a UFO buff from
Michigan. Wight knew of Richard Shaver’s
claims, published in the 1940s in the Ziff-
Davis science-fiction magazines Amazing Sto -
ries and Fantastic Adventures, that the rem¬
nants of two advanced races, tero and dero
(good and evil respectively), lived in vast cav¬
erns under Earth’s surface. Though Wight was
skeptical of these claims, he had an interest in
cave-exploring that he indulged with David
L., for whose mimeographed saucer newslet¬
ter Wight contributed a regular column. They
did their spelunking with three other men. All
of them were acquainted with Charles A.
Marcoux, another columnist for the maga¬
zine. Unlike the others, Marcoux was an ob¬
sessed believer in Shaverian concepts, to the
extent that he gave occasional public lectures
on the subject. The spelunkers sometimes at¬
tended those lectures but considered his be¬
liefs absurd.

46 Blowing Cave

In 1966, the group, now consisting of
twelve persons, went down to Arkansas to ex¬
plore Blowing Cave on a week-long expedi¬
tion. On their return, members wrote letters
to Ray Palmer, once editor of Amazing Stories
and Shaver’s principal promoter, claiming that
they had encountered intelligent beings—
Shaver’s teros—deep inside the cavern. Palmer
did not reply. Apparently a few months later,
Wight went back and chose to stay with the
underearth people. He returned in 1967 to
give a written account to David L., who by
this time had left the UFO field and no longer
wanted to be publicly associated with it.
Wight asked L. to pass on the diary to Charles
Marcoux. Wight felt that in ridiculing his be¬
liefs he had wronged him and wanted to pro¬
vide him with the proof that Shaver was right.
He then returned to his tero friends and has
not been seen since.

David L., however, had long since lost
track of Marcoux, and it was not until thir¬
teen years later that he came upon his name.
He tracked him down and handed him the
manuscript. Its effect on Marcoux was electri¬
fying, and it set in motion the events that
would eventually lead to his premature death.

The manuscript related that while explor¬
ing Blowing Cave, the group spotted a light at
the end of a tunnel. As the spelunkers ap¬
proached it, Wight noticed a narrow crevice,
just big enough for him to squeeze inside it.
There he found clearly artificial steps. He
called to his friends, and they climbed
through the opening. On the other side of it,
the opening expanded, and they were able to
walk upright. “Suddenly,” Wight wrote, “we
came into a large tunnel/corridor, about
twenty feet wide and just as high. All the walls
and the floor were smooth, and the ceiling
had a curved dome shape. We know that this
was not a freak of nature, but manmade. We
had accidentally stumbled into the secret cav¬
ern world” (Toronto, n.d.).

Soon they encountered blue-skinned but
otherwise humanlike individuals. The strangers
said that they had permitted the crew to find
the tunnel and enter it because they had instru¬

ments that measured people’s emotions; the ex¬
plorers were determined to have good inten¬
tions. They learned that the tunnels went on
for hundreds of miles and led to underearth
cities populated by entities that included ser¬
pentlike creatures and Sasquatchlike hairy
bipeds. Soon after their initial conversation,
Wight and his companions were taken to a
kind of elevator that led them to the under-
earthers’ place of residence, a city made of glass.
It turned out that their guides were Noah’s di¬
rect descendants, who had found their way un¬
derground in the wake of the flood. There they
found supertechnology and the remains of an
advanced civilization, along with teros. Appar¬
ently at some point, Wight’s group met the
teros who had been there all along.

This was not the only trip the group took
to Blowing Cave. Unable to get anybody on
the surface to believe their story, Wight and
his friends vowed to return with conclusive
proof. During one expedition, they captured a
giant cave moth, preserved it in a bag, and
brought it up with them. When they opened
the bag, however, the sunlight disintegrated
the insect into a fine dust.

Not long afterward, Wight decided to stay
with the underearth people. According to one
source, “all evidence of [his] ever existing
began to mysteriously disappear from the sur¬
face. Birth certificates, school records, com¬
puter records, bank records, etc., all seemed to
vanish, apparently the work of someone in a
very influential position” (Untitled, n.d.).
Other members of the group made another
trip into the cave, where they saw their friend
for the last time. Wight returned once to the
surface to meet David L.

In 1980, Marcoux saw the manuscript and
read Wight’s words addressed to him: “Yes,
Charles, all that you told us is true. ... I owe
you a debt of gratitude, because the Teros
healed my crippled leg, instantly. I am grateful
for more than just that, and I have left these
notes and somewhere a map so that you, too,
can . . . visit with these people. . . . Maybe we
will meet here some day” (Toronto, n.d.).
Marcoux set about organizing an expedition,

Boys from Topside 47

soliciting members in such small-circulation
hollow-earth publications as Shavertron and
The Hollow Hassle.

Marcoux and his wife moved to Cushman
in 1983. There, in November, as he was visit¬
ing the land around the cave, a swarm of bees
descended on him. The resulting shock and
trauma precipitated a heart attack, and he
died on the spot.

Some hollow-earth enthusiasts speculated
that sinister forces that wanted to keep the
caves a secret had caused the attack. Others
saw it as just a tragic accident. In any case,
Marcoux’s death ended efforts to explore
Blowing Cave in search of underearthers.

Further Reading

Toronto, Richard, n.d. “The Shaver Mystery.” http://
www.parascope.com/nb/articles/shaver/Mystery.
htm.

Untitled, n.d. http://www.rcbbs.com/docs/empire7.
txt.

Bonnie

In 1977, William Hamilton, a California man
interested in UFOs, met “a young, very pretty
blond girl with almond-shaped eyes and per¬
fect small teeth.” Bonnie, whom Hamilton
judged sincere and sane, told him she was
born in 1951 in the Lemurian city ofTelos,
located inside an artificial domelike cavern a
mile beneath Mount Shasta on California’s
northern border.

Bonnie told him that she, her parents, her
two sisters, and her two cousins move freely
back and forth between our society and their
native city. They also travel to other subter¬
ranean Lemurian and Atlantean cities, via a
tube transit train system that travels as fast as
2,500 miles per hour. The Lemurians are also
able to fly into outer space in saucerlike vehi¬
cles, and they interact with visiting extrater¬
restrials. Telos has a population of one and a
half million who live a communal existence
without money. She warned Hamilton that by
the end of the century, Earths axis will shift.
The result will be massive devastation and
huge loss of life. On the other side of this ter¬

rible event, human beings would come
together as one and fashion a utopian society
“on a higher plane of vibrations” (Beckley,
1993).

In Bonnie’s account the Lemurians came to
Earth two hundred thousand years ago from
the planet Aurora. Atlantis (in the Atlantic)
and Lemuria (in the Pacific) fought a war
against each other twenty-five thousand years
ago, but it was a natural catastrophe that
brought Lemuria to the ocean bottom ten
thousand years later. Atlantis was destroyed a
few centuries later when Atlantean scientists
conducted irresponsible experiments with
cosmic, energy-generating “fire crystals.”

See Also: Atlantis; Lemuria; Mount Shasta

Further Reading

Beckley, Timothy Green, ed., 1993. The Smoky God
and Other Inner Earth Mysteries. New Brunswick,
NJ: Inner Light Publications.

Boys from Topside

Wilbert B. Smith (1910—1962), an engineer
who worked for Canada’s Department of
Transport (DOT), believed himself to be in
contact with philosophically and scientifically
inclined extraterrestrials. He called them the
“Boys from Topside.”

It is unclear when these psychic messages
began, but it could have been as early as 1950.
Smith was at first circumspect about them,
though he was willing to acknowledge an in¬
terest in UFO investigation. In late 1950, he
secured access to use DOT laboratory and
field facilities during off-hours in an effort to
gather technical data about UFO sightings.
(According to one source, Smith was acting
under the guidance of space people all the
while, though he said nothing about them to
his superiors.) Smith hoped for a break¬
through sufficient to overthrow conventional
technology and put in its place a wholly new
one. He called his work “Project Magnet,” re¬
flecting his conviction that flying saucers flew
along magnetic fields. In 1952 Smith partici¬
pated in a small UFO study group put
together by the Canadian government’s De-

48 Brodies deros

fense Research Board. The following year,
Smith released Project Magnet’s findings,
which were—perhaps not surprisingly—that
UFOs performed in ways that are “difficult to
reconcile . . . with the capabilities of our tech¬
nology”; thus, “we are forced to the conclu¬
sion that the vehicles are probably extra-ter¬
restrial” (Smith, 1953).

He urged his superiors to set up a monitor¬
ing station that would check for UFO activity
over a twenty-four-hour period. They agreed
to the proposal and provided a DOT-owned
hut on Shirley’s Bay, some ten miles west of
Ottawa. The installation contained an ionos¬
pheric reactor, an electronic sound-measure¬
ment device, a gamma-ray detector, a
gravimeter, a magnetometer, and a radio. If a
passing UFO set off any of these, an alarm
would sound. Two government scientists and
two civilian astronomers worked with Smith.
This work was done on their own time, but
the “flying saucer observatory” garnered much
embarrassing publicity for the Canadian gov¬
ernment. It was closed at the end of August
1954. Even so, Smith was privately assured
that he could continue UFO research so long
as it was not at the taxpayer’s expense; he was
also welcome to use government equipment.

Because of his credentials and his employer,
conservative ufologists who otherwise avoided
persons associated with contact claims wel¬
comed Smith into their ranks, ignoring, as
much as possible, his private assertions about
the Boys from Topside. Through his own and
others’ psychic contacts, he conversed with ex¬
traterrestrials and attempted to learn from
them. In a letter to the prominent (and out¬
spokenly anticontactee) ufologist Donald E.
Keyhoe on December 11, 1955, Smith wrote,
“I have learned a great deal, but I am a small
child attempting to assimilate a college
course. Believe me, I have been shown
glimpses of a philosophy and technology al¬
most beyond comprehension.”

By now, Smith had largely abandoned
more conventional techniques of UFO inves¬
tigating, and he was entirely focused on con-
tactees, whom he quizzed intensely and whose

stories he compared before deciding on their
validity. At least some of them, he thought,
were telling the truth. He was gratified that
the space people were patient enough to put
up with his methods. In an article in En¬
gland’s Flying Saucer Review, after he went
public with his extraterrestrial connections, he
declared, “I began for the first time in my life
to realize the basic ‘Oneness’ of the Universe
and all that is in it” (Smith, 1958).

In 1956, Smith formed the contactee-ori-
ented Ottawa Flying Saucer Club. When not
grilling contactees or taking direct messages
himself, he occupied himself with sky watches
in parks and rural areas with like-minded
friends. He lectured and wrote about his be¬
liefs in saucer magazines, and he even spoke
openly with reporters. He died of intestinal
cancer on December 27, 1962.

See Also: Contactees

Further Reading

Beckley, Timothy Green, and Ottawa New Sciences
Club, eds., n.d. The Boys from Topside. New York:
UFO Review.

Cooper, Philip, 1959. “Men from Mars among Us—
He’s Talked to Them!” Ottawa Citizen (April 14).

“Flying Saucers Project Denied,” 1953. New York
Times (November 14).

Gross, Loren E., 1982. UFOs: A History — 1950: Au -
gust—December. Fremont, CA: self-published.

Nixon, Stuart, 1973. “W. B. Smith—The Man be¬
hind Project Magnet.” UFO Quarterly Review 1,

1 (January/March): 2-11.

Smith, Wilbert B., 1953. Project Magnet Report. Ot¬
tawa, Ontario: Department of Transport.

-, 1954. Project Magnet, the Canadian Flying

Saucer Study. Ottawa, Ontario: self-published.

-, 1958. “The Philosophy of the Saucers.” Fly -

ing Saucer Review 4, 3 (May/June): 10-11.

Brodies deros

In the mythology of the Shaver mystery, the
creation of Richard Sharpe Shaver, deros are
cannibalistic, sadistic idiots who live in caves
underneath the earth. As the degenerated de¬
scendants of an advanced race of extraterres¬
trials that thousands of years ago colonized
our planet, they have access to the elders’ ad¬
vanced technology. They use it, however, for
destructive and even perverted purposes on

Brodies deros 49

each other and, most of all, on surface hu¬
mans, whom they sometimes kidnap for tor¬
ture and other unpleasant purposes. The bulk
of the Shaver mystery material was published,
mostly as true, in two science-fiction maga¬
zines, Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adven -
tures, in the mid- to late 1940s.

Few other people claim to have encoun¬
tered deros. The late John J. Robinson, a New
Jersey man with a longstanding interest in
UFOs and the paranormal, often told the
story of Steve Brodie, who had his own horri¬
fying, and possibly ultimately fatal, dealings
with the deros.

According to Robinson, in 1944 he was
living on the third floor of a Jersey City
house. Directly beneath him on the second
floor was a reclusive individual, Steve Brodie,
who claimed to be an artist. Over time,
Robinson won his trust, and the two often
spoke. Among Brodies quirks was his aver¬
sion to meat; and more unusual, as Robinson
recalled, “he seemed to be afraid that some¬
one might be attempting to sneak up behind
him.” When he walked on the street, he
walked in the middle of the street, appar¬
ently out of fear that someone might jump
out of an alley or a doorway. On several oc¬
casions, Robinson watched Brodie paint.
Sometimes the artist would enter a trancelike
state and create weird, otherworldly land¬
scapes that looked nothing like the paintings
he did in ordinary consciousness. Asked
where these images came from, Brodie
replied, “I don’t know. I feel as if I paint
these pictures from memory. It’s like I can
close my eyes and let it.”

Once Brodie seemed startled when he saw
Robinson with an issue of Amazing Stories in
his coat pocket. Robinson, who was closely
following the Shaver mystery tales the maga¬
zine was running, launched into an explana¬
tion of Shaver’s claims. When he heard the
word “dero,” Brodie blanched. “Fie writes of
the dero!” he exclaimed. Robinson persuaded
Brodie to explain his remark. Reluctantly,
after securing assurances that Robinson would
not ridicule him, he related something that

had happened to him and a friend seven years
before.

The two had gone to a western state in
search of semiprecious stones. Local people
warned them to stay away from a certain
desert mesa because several individuals who
had gone there were never seen again. Disre¬
garding these words of caution, the young
men repaired to the site and spent the next
few days energetically stone-hunting. Finally,
one day, hearing his companion shout, Brodie
looked up to see a figure in a black cowl
standing at the base of the mesa. Another fig¬
ure joined the first. The first of them pointed
a rodlike device at Brodie, who abruptly felt
himself paralyzed. His friend began to run,
and the other figure pointed a rod at him. To
his horror the smell of burning human flesh
rose up in Brodies nostrils. He never saw his
friend again.

A third figure, holding what looked like
earphones, approached Brodie and then
walked past him. He felt something being
placed just beneath his ears just before he lost
consciousness. “At this point in his narrative,”
Robinson said, “Steve showed me why he
wore his hair long at the back of his head. Be¬
hind each ear at the base of the parietal bones
of his skull were bare, seared, scarred patches
of skin upon which no hair could grow. Both
of these areas behind the ears were a little
smaller than the size of a silver dollar and were
perfectly circular. Steve said they were the
marks of a dero slave!”

In the ordeal that followed, Brodie was
only intermittently conscious. On three or
four occasions, he awoke to find himself in a
cage with other human beings. They told him
that he was “in the caves,” and they were
under the control of the “deros,” who could
snatch any human being off the face of the
earth if they so chose. Each time it became ev¬
ident that he was conscious, a black-cowled
figure would zap him back into oblivion.

Then one day he found himself walking
down a street in New York City with no idea
how he had gotten there. He was dressed in
his prospecting clothes. His personal items

50 Brown’s Martians

were still in his pockets, including a hundred
dollars in bills. Though to his awareness only
a day had passed, he soon learned that it was
two years later.

Brodie said that ever since he could not eat
meat. The very scent of it nearly made him ill.

Robinson had observed that Brodie was
not a reader, and he was certain that he had
not concocted a tale from reading the Shaver
series.

Not long afterward, business concerns
forced Robinson to move from his Jersey City
apartment. He fell out of contact with Brodie
for six months. When he came back for a
visit, Brodie was gone. Robinson talked with a
mutual acquaintance who had his own strange
story. He said he had seen Brodie on a train in
Arizona. When he had spoken to Brodie, he
had not responded or even acknowledged his
presence. He seemed to be in a “stupor,” the
man thought, though Robinson knew Brodie
was not a drinker. The train stopped at a small
town, and when the train resumed its journey
Brodie was no longer on it. Robinson saw this
as evidence that the deros had reclaimed their
victim.

After relating this anecdote on Long John
Nebel’s popular radio talk show on New
York’s WOR one night in March 1957,
Robinson went to work the next day and was
surprised when a business associate confided
his own experience. He said that maybe
Brodies experience explained something that
had happened to him in 1942, when he was
seventeen years old. He had been visiting his
friend Fred when they decided to go to a
“haunted mine” nearby. Supposedly, it had a
long history of accidents, disasters, and unex¬
plained disappearances of miners. Undeterred,
the two climbed over a pile of debris to get to
one side of the entrance. There they were
shocked to observe a grotesque entity, four
and a half feet tall, with a bulky body. It let
out a soul-chilling scream and chased the boys
back to town. They took refuge in a movie
theater. Even so, they swore they could see
dark forms moving up and down the aisles as
if looking for them. That night they thought

they saw the figure sitting in a tree near the
house.

Later, Fred vanished without a trace.
Searchers came upon his bicycle near the
haunted mine, and nothing further was
learned of his fate. “To this day,” the man told
Robinson, “I am afraid that whoever or what¬
ever it was that got Fred will find me.”

Further Reading

Steiger, Brad, and Joan Whritenour, 1968. New
UFO Breakthrough. New York: Award Books.

Brown’s Martians

Clairvoyant Courtney Brown reports that his
psychic probing of Mars has uncovered the
startling truth that Mars was, and is, inhab¬
ited. Brown came to this conclusion while
using psychic talents to explore the Cydonia
region of the planet’s surface, where some have
felt that enigmatic artifacts, including the so-
called Martian Face—an alleged structure said
to depict human features—are situated.

The Martians now live underground. Mil¬
lions of years ago, they lived on the surface
but were nearly driven to extinction when an
immense asteroid passed through the atmos¬
phere and severely damaged it. The atmos¬
phere continued to deteriorate until what lit¬
tle was left of it was sucked into space. Many
Martians died, but their race was preserved
when Grays—the gray-skinned humanoid
reported in UFO abduction cases—inter¬
vened. They collected the Martian DNA and
stored it and genetically altered the surviving
inhabitants of the Red Planet. They put
them into underground cities, where they
live now.

The Martians’ problems are far from over,
however. The genetic alterations have not en¬
tirely worked, and their own technology has
not been able to overcome the existing short¬
comings. More and more Martians are look¬
ing to Earth as their potential home. Accord¬
ing to Brown, the Martians are much like
human beings in appearance but different
enough so that humans and Martians would

Bucky 51

never be confused. They have light skin, eyes
bigger than humans’ and no hair.

See Also: Abductions by UFOs; Allingham’s Mart¬
ian; Aurora Martian; Dentons’s Martians and
Venusians; Hopkins’s Martians; Khauga; Martian
bees; Mince-Pie Martians; Monka; Shaw’s Mar¬
tians; Smead’s Martians; Wilcox’s Martians

Further Reading

Brown, Courtney, 1996. Cosmic Voyage: Scientific Re -
mote Viewing, Extraterrestrials, and a Message for
Mankind. New York: Dutton Books.

Bucky

Buck Nelson, a sixty-five-year-old bachelor
who lived on a remote farm in the Ozark
Mountains of Missouri, met Bucky of Venus
on March 5, 1955. But his first sighting of
spaceships took place when three of them
hovered over his farm on July 3, 1954, and
one shot a beam of light at him, healing his
lumbago and restoring his eyesight to the de¬
gree that he no longer needed glasses. The fol¬
lowing year on February 1, a saucer returned.
This time a voice, speaking in clear English,
came through a loudspeaker to ask if Nelson
were friendly. The voice went on to explain
that the saucer’s crew was from Venus. Nelson
glimpsed three human-looking, muscular
men inside the craft. Around midnight on
March 5, the three men, with their dog, 385-
pound Big Bo, entered Nelson’s house and
conversed with him. All three men were nude,
carrying their clothes on their shoulders; be¬
fore putting their uniforms back on, they ex¬
plained that they wanted to assure Nelson
that except for their place of origin they were
normal men. One of them said his name was
Bucky.

Bucky—sometimes referred to in subse¬
quent accounts as “Little Bucky” to distin¬
guish him from the much older Buck—said
he had been born nineteen years earlier on a
Colorado farm. In 1940, a Venusian spaceship
landed on the family property, and members
of the crew offered to fly the whole family to
their home planet for a visit. Only Bucky,
then four years old, wanted to go. The Venu¬
sians agreed to return one day when he was

old enough to make a mature decision on the
matter. They came back in 1953, and Bucky
accompanied them to Venus, where he had
resided for two years before Buck Nelson met
him. Besides Bucky, Nelson’s visitors included
Bob Solomon, a two-hundred-year-old Venu¬
sian, and an old man who, his age notwith¬
standing, was a trainee learning how to fly a
spacecraft. After an hour the visitors left, but
not before telling Nelson that they would fly
him to other planets, Nelson wrote later, “if I
would tell about it to the world” (Nelson,
1956).

Around midnight on April 24, Bucky and
his friends arrived to take Nelson into space.
He and his dog, Teddy, went to Mars. There
Nelson ate a delicious meal and talked with
the friendly human inhabitants, and then the
ship went on to the Moon for another meal
and a good rest. He, Teddy, and Big Bo went
for a short walk before embarking for Venus.
During one brief stop they saw the “ruler” of
the region engaged in painting. He was clad,
like Nelson himself, in bib overalls. Venus,
like Mars and the Moon, turned out to be a
pleasant place without war or conflict, where
people lived in harmony under the Twelve
Laws of God (essentially the Ten Command¬
ments and a couple of verses from the New
Testament). On Venus, the races were strictly
segregated. Nelson also was told that his own
parents were Venusians.

Bucky became a regular visitor at Nelson’s
house. They spent Christmas 1956 together.
On another occasion, he brought a fully
cooked Venusian turkey with him. On yet an¬
other Christmas, Bucky took Nelson to his
home on Venus.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Nelson
was a minor celebrity on the contactee scene.
At one point, he sold packets of hair reported
to be from Big Bo, who, he said, had been left
in his custody for a time. New York City radio
personality Long John Nebel, who met Nel¬
son at the Fourth Interplanetary Spacecraft
Convention at Giant Rock, California, in
1957, said: “It is my impression that Buck
Nelson has made very little money out of his

52 Buff Ledge abduction

wild, if somewhat crude, stories, but there are
those who believe in him, many for just that
reason. Frankly, I suspect that he would
change this aspect of his activities if he could”
(Nebel, 1961).

See Also: Contactees

Further Reading

Dean, John W., 1964. Flying Saucers and the Scrip -
tures. New York: Vantage Press.

Nebel, Long John, 1961. The Way OutWorld. Engle¬
wood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Nelson, Buck, 1956. My Trip to Mars, the Moon, and
Venus. Mountain View, MO: self-published.

-, 1955. “A Strange Tale from Missouri.” Fly -

ing Saucer Review 1, 2 (May/June): 4-5.

Buff Ledge abduction

The UFO abduction that reportedly oc¬
curred at Buff Ledge, north of Burlington,
Vermont, is unusual in that it involved two
persons who, though separated by years and
distance, provided strikingly similar accounts
to an investigator.

The incident took place at Buff Ledge
Camp, a since-closed girls’ camp. The two
witnesses have never been publicly identified,
but astronomer and ufologist Walter N.
Webb, who spent years probing the episode,
gives them the pseudonyms Michael Lapp
and Janet Cornell. On the evening of August
7, 1968, Lapp and Cornell, who worked as
counselors, were relaxing on an L-shaped
dock that jutted one hundred feet out into
Lake Champlain and which was largely con¬
cealed by the bluff from the view of others.
The camp was nearly deserted; most campers
and counselors were off on a trip elsewhere.

Lapp and Cornell witnessed the approach
of a bright light that soon resolved into a
white, glowing, cigar-shaped object. Soon
three smaller white lights emerged from the
bottom right side. As the last light came into
view, the cigar-shaped object sailed away. The
small UFOs executed various maneuvers
through the sky, moving close enough so that
the observers could see that they were domed
and disc-shaped. After five minutes, two of

them departed in opposite directions, to the
north and south, emitting sounds like “thou¬
sands of tuning forks,” as Lapp would put it.
The remaining UFO flew toward them, and
now it looked the size of a small house.
Abruptly it streaked upward, vanished, then
reappeared to plummet into the water about a
mile away.

Soon the UFO came back to the surface
and flew, at an altitude of fifteen feet above
the water, toward the witnesses again. It
stopped some sixty feet from them, and now
it was so near that Lapp could see right into
its transparent dome, where he was shocked
to observe two large-headed figures, short in
stature with big eyes and small mouths, who
were clad in gray or silver uniforms.

Turning to his companion, Lapp saw a
woman in an apparent trance. She did not act
as if she had heard him when he spoke to her.
At that point Lapp decided to try an experi¬
ment, and he addressed the entities. Who
were they, he asked, and why were they here?
To his surprise a voice with a “feminine qual¬
ity” spoke inside his head to assure him they
meant no harm. Over the next few minutes,
as Lapp spoke his questions aloud, and the
alien woman replied telepathically, he was
told that the aliens had “returned after the
first atomic bomb exploded” and that they
were seeking some form of energy about
which the voice provided no details. They
were also engaged in war with others of their
race, characterizing these enemies as “evil.”
When Lapp asked where they came from, he
heard a name he could not pronounce or sub¬
sequently remember.

Finally, with the two beings disappearing
below the deck, the UFO positioned itself ten
feet above the witnesses’ heads. A beam shone
down on them, a kind of “liquid light” that
felt weirdly as if it were shining inside Lapp’s
head. Fie and Cornell fell down on the deck
as voices and machine sounds echoed.

The next thing they knew, it was dark.
They were lying on the deck as two girls atop
the bluff were shouting about a UFO. The

Bunians 53

object was ascending and shooting beams of
light toward the girls.

The following evening Lapp drove home to
tell his parents, who responded with skepti¬
cism, about his sighting. He also informed his
girlfriend, who was similarly unreceptive. He
did not discuss the incident with Cornell and
soon lost contact with her. In the years ahead,
he had dreams about being onboard the UFO
and developed an interest in mysticism and
religion. In 1978 he discussed his experience
with Webb, then an astronomer employed by
Boston’s Hayden Planetarium.

Subsequently, Webb traced Cornell to At¬
lanta. She confirmed the sighting though all
she could recall of it was that a “big light” had
approached them, they had fallen down, and
some sort of mental block had ensued. Webb
had refrained from sharing the details Lapp
provided him; still, Cornells account matched
Lapp’s to the extent that her memory allowed.

Separately placed under hypnosis, the two
recounted an abduction experience. Lapp
“remembered” standing on the deck with
one of the humanoids looking into space and
observing Earth, Moon, stars, and the cigar¬
shaped craft. Cornell was stretched on a table
in the lower level as two aliens conducted
what seemed to be a physical examination on
her. Lapp was put on a table next to hers and
lost consciousness. On recovering, he found
that the ship had entered a hangar that was
inside yet a larger one. He and an alien com¬
panion sailed on a beam of light through a
wall. An elevator took them to an enormous
domed room occupied by many humanoids,
who were watching something out of Lapp’s
line of vision. Taken into another room, he
had a vision of an unknown landscape occu¬
pied by distraught, weeping human beings.
He passed out. When he awoke, he seemed
to be falling through space, while a globe full
of television screens with his picture on each
appeared in front of him. He stepped
through one of the screens, and on the other
side of it, he and Cornell were back on the
dock.

Cornell’s story was less detailed than
Lapp’s. She remembered being suddenly
aboard the UFO and described the entities
nearly exactly as her companion had. Her “re¬
call” of the vehicle’s interior matched Lapp’s.

Webb devoted five years to the investiga¬
tion in an effort to substantiate anything that
could be substantiated. To his disappoint¬
ment, he found no one, who had been at the
camp in August 1968, who could corroborate
the UFO sighting. Background checks and
psychological tests attested to Lapp’s and Cor¬
nell’s sincerity and honesty.

See Also: Abductions by UFOs

Further Reading

Webb, Walter N., 1994. Encounter at Buff Ledge: A
UFO Case History. Chicago: J. Allen Hynek Cen¬
ter for UFO Studies.

Bunians

Ahmad Jamaludin, a ufologist and veterinary
surgeon who lives in Malaysia, says that noth¬
ing precisely like the abduction phenomenon
known to his Western colleagues seems to be
occurring in his country, but there are tradi¬
tions of kidnappings by what are called the
“Bunian people.” The Bunians are the
Malaysian version of fairies. Like fairies else¬
where, the Bunians exist not only in oral tra¬
dition, but also in what are alleged to be ac¬
tual experiences.

One such incident is said to have taken
place in June 1982. A twelve-year-old girl,
Maswati Pilus, had gone one morning to the
river behind her house, intending to wash
clothes there. She encountered a small female
being whose sudden appearance had a strange
effect on the girl’s consciousness. She felt as if
only she and the being existed. There were no
other sounds or sights. The being offered to
take her to another land, and Maswati, who
felt no fear, found herself looking at a bright,
beautiful landscape. She sensed that time was
passing, but the events that occurred during
her experience were blurred and vague in her
memory.

54 Bunians

Meanwhile, her relatives were looking fran¬
tically for her. Two days later, they came upon
her in a location near her house where they
had already searched more than once. She was
unconscious but soon recovered.

See Also: Abductions by UFOs; Fairies encountered

Further Reading

Randles, Jenny, 1988. Abduction: Over 200 Docu -
mented UFO Kidnappings Investigated. London:
Robert Flale.

Calf-rustling aliens

On April 23, 1897, a Kansas newspaper, the
Yates Center Farmers Advocate, printed an affi¬
davit attesting to an instance of interplanetary
calf-rustling. There were three witnesses, the
most prominent of whom was Alex Hamil¬
ton, a rancher from LeRoy, who soberly re¬
lated the following:

We were awakened by a noise among the
cattle. . . . Upon going to the door I saw to my
utter amazement that an airship was slowly de¬
scending upon my cow lot about forty rods [six
hundred feet] from the house. Calling my ten¬
ant, Gid Heslip, and my son Wall, we seized
some axes and ran to the corral. Meanwhile the
ship had been gently descending until it was
not more than thirty feet above the ground and
we came within fifty yards of it. It consisted of a
great cigar-shaped portion, possibly three hun¬
dred feet long, with a carriage underneath. The
carriage was made of glass or some other trans¬
parent material. It was brightly lighted within
and everything was plainly visible—it was occu¬
pied by some of the strangest beings I ever saw.
There were two men, a woman, and three chil¬
dren. They were jabbering together but we
could not understand a syllable they said.

The occupants suddenly turned a search¬
light on the trio, and the ship got closer to

them. The witnesses then noticed a calf
caught in the fence, with “a cable . . . fastened
in a slip knot around her neck one end pass¬
ing up to the vessel and tangled in wire.” They
tried to cut the cable, but when they failed,
they watched as it and the ship sailed away.
The following day a neighbor found the calf’s
butchered remains in a field where there was,
Hamilton said, no “track of any kind on the
soft ground.”

Appended to the published account was a
statement by some of the county’s leading cit¬
izens who attested to Hamilton’s truthfulness
and good character. The story was published
during a nationwide wave of sightings of mys¬
terious “airships” (UFOs). Some newspapers
had speculated, seriously or otherwise, that
extraterrestrial visitors were flying the ships.
When Hamilton’s story was rediscovered
decades later, after UFOs had entered popular
consciousness, it was widely published in the
UFO literature, which cited it as an example
of an early close encounter of the third kind.

In 1976, however, writer Jerome Clark col¬
lected testimony from an elderly woman who
had known the Hamilton family. She recalled
hearing the elder Hamilton tell his wife that
he and his friends from a local liars’ club, one
of them the newspaper editor, had made up
the story. Several years later UFO historian

An example of cattle mutilation at Morrill Farm, Piermont, New Hampshire, September 27, 1978 (Loren
Coleman/Fortean Picture Library)

Thomas E. Bullard came upon a letter Hamil¬
ton had written to a Missouri paper, the
Atchison County Mail (May 7, 1897), cheer¬
fully confessing that there was no truth to the
story.

Many years later, psychologist Susan Marie
Powers studied the claims of a woman who
claimed to have been abducted by extraterres¬
trials on a number of occasions. Once, while
aboard a UFO, the occupants would lasso a
cow, take it inside the craft, and extract blood
from it. “I watched [as] the blood went into a
tube and then into a big tank,” the woman re¬
ported. “The cow’s eyes would glaze over.
Then I knew she was dead. We would fly back
and drop her in the pasture with the other
cows. The little people do not eat meat. They
take the blood home with them” (Powers,
1994).

Another abductee, a Texas woman named
Judy Doraty, related under hypnosis her al¬
leged observation of a levitation of a calf into
a UFO one night in 1973. The gray-skinned
humanoid crew cut up the animal while still

alive, apparently as part of its study of the ef¬
fects of pollution on earthly creatures. Myrna
Hansen told a similar story under hypnosis, of
an abduction in New Mexico in 1980, during
which a calf was brought into a UFO and mu¬
tilated while still alive.

According to ufologist Linda Moulton
Howe, a rancher near Waco, Texas, came
upon two greenish humanoids with almond
eyes and big, egg-shaped heads as they were
carting away one of his calves. Terrified, he
fled the scene. When he had recovered his
nerve a couple of days later, he, his wife, and
his son went to the scene. There they found,
in Howe’s words, “the calf’s hide pulled back
over the skull and folded inside out on the
ground. . . . About a foot from the empty
hide was a complete calf backbone without
ribs” (Howe, 1989).

In July 1983, Ron and Paula Watson, a
Missouri farm couple, spotted a landed UFO
in a pasture. A bipedal “lizard-type crea¬
ture”—known to ufologists as a reptoid—
stood nearby. Through binoculars the Wat-

Captive extraterrestrials 57

sons watched as two other beings, white¬
skinned humanoids in silver suits, ran their
fingers over a black cow, which, though alive,
was immobile as if paralyzed. Suddenly the
cow floated up the ramp into the UFO, which
then, weirdly, seemed to fade into the hill,
along with the three aliens.

See Also: Aurora Martian; Close encounters of the
third kind; Hopkins’s Martians; Michigan giant;
Reptoids; Shaw’s Martians

Further Reading

Bullard, Thomas E., ed., 1982. The Airship File: A
Collection of Texts Concerning Phantom Airships
and Other UFOs, Gathered from Neivspapers and
Periodicals Mostly during the Flundred Years Prior
to Kenneth Arnold’s Sighting. Bloomington, IN:
self-published.

Clark, Jerome, 1977. “The Great Airship Hoax.”
Fate 30, 2 (February): 94-97.

Howe, Linda Moulton, 1989. An Alien Harvest: Fur -
ther Evidence Linking Animal Mutilations and
Human Abductions to Alien Life Forms. Littleton,
CO: Linda Moulton Howe Publications.

Powers, Susan Marie, 1994. “Thematic Content
Analyses of the Reports of UFO Abductees and
Close Encounter Witnesses: Indications of Re¬
pressed Sexual Abus e.” Journal of UFO Studies 5
(n.s.): 35-54.

Captive extraterrestrials

Along with rumors of dead extraterrestrials
supposedly found in or near crashed space¬
craft, there is a persistent lore of aliens who
are held in captivity.

Ufologist William L. Moore claims to have
heard one such account from anonymous mil¬
itary and official sources said to be privy to
highly classified UFO secrets. In 1949, the
sources asserted, a male humanoid was discov¬
ered alive in the southwestern desert, the sur¬
vivor of the crash of an extraterrestrial space¬
craft. Authorities housed the being, called
EBE (ee-buh, after extraterrestrial biological
entity), at the atomic installation at Los
Alamos, New Mexico. An air force captain
was assigned the job of watching over the
being. Communication with the alien proved
impossible until a speech device was invented
and implanted into his throat, enabling him
to speak a kind of broken but understandable

English. EBE said he had been the equivalent
of a mechanic on the crashed craft. EBE died
of unknown causes in 1952.

Moore’s sources alleged that EBE later was
called EBE-1, because two other aliens—
EBE-2 and EBE-3—later fell into U.S. gov¬
ernment hands. The three captives revealed
that nine alien races were visiting Earth. One
in particular, the little gray-skinned beings,
had been especially active. This group had
been monitoring human activities for twenty-
five thousand years and had manipulated our
religious beliefs.

In his book UFO Crash at Aztec (1986),
William S. Steinman reports another alleged
1948 incident, this one involving a physician
from Bishop, California, named Claude E.
Steen, Sr. (Elsewhere in his book Steinman
gives the year as 1949 and spells the last name
“Steene.”) A “member of a special military
unit” contacted Steen and led him and his
nurse to a location where an alien was being
kept alive. It was in a chamber with a con¬
trolled environment. The being appeared to
be some kind of reptile. Its appearance so
upset the nurse that she said it looked like
something “from the pits of hell.”

On July 23, 1952, a Colorado newspaper,
the Pueblo Chieftain, related a peculiar story.
Speaking to the local Chamber of Commerce,
Joseph Rohrer, president of Pikes Peak Broad¬
casting, said he knew of three saucer crashes
in Montana. One of the occupants that had
survived, a three-foot-tall humanoid, was still
being kept alive in an incubator in California,
where efforts were being made to communi¬
cate with him. In April 2000, ufologist Kenny
Young conducted inquiries into these curious
claims, eventually learning that Rohrer was a
prankster with a sense of humor. Even though
the paper had treated his story seriously, its
audience understood that he was speaking
tongue in cheek.

See Also: Dead extraterrestrials; Extraterrestrial Bio¬
logical Entities

Further Reading

Moore, William L., 1987. Personal communication
to Jerome Clark.

58 Cetaceans

Steinman, William S., with Wendelle C. Stevens,
1986. UFO Crash at Aztec: A Well Kept Secret.
Tucson, AZ: UFO Photo Archives.

Young, Kenny, 2000. “Talk Startles Crowd’: Investi¬
gation of Strange 1952 Newspaper Article.”
http://home.fuse.net/ufo/rohrer.html

Cetaceans

The Cetaceans are a “One Group Mind” con¬
sisting of the worlds whales and dolphins.
They channel through Rochester, New York,
psychic Dianne Robbins, who also receives
messages from Adama, a resident of the
Lemurian city Telos under California’s
Mount Shasta. The Cetaceans monitor events
on Earth—in the ocean, on the land, and in
the skies—and keep human beings from
harmful extraterrestrials. They also seek to
protect the earth from pollution and other
destructive forces because human beings have
neglected their responsibilities as “the
Guardians of Love that Earth needs as she
floats along her path through space” (“We
Are,” n.d.). The human race, like the
Cetaceans themselves, came to Earth long
ago from other star systems with the specific
task of taking care of this planet. Unfortu¬
nately, memories of that distant event have
faded among humans, and the Cetaceans are
working with space intelligences to reawaken
humanity’s sleeping consciousness.

If intruders enter Earth’s atmosphere and
violate cosmic ethical standards, the Ce¬
taceans telepathically notify the Galactic
Command, with which they are in constant
contact. Often the Cetaceans will project their
consciousness into the command’s spacecraft.

Earth will soon enter the Photon Belt,
which will have the effect of bringing humans
out of the darkness and into the light, restor¬
ing them to their cosmic destiny. “We came
here especially for this time when the Earth
would be transiting into a higher dimen¬
sions,” the Cetaceans say.

Channeling through a California-based
metaphysical group, the Council of Nine
from the planet Sirius B, this area’s branch of
the Galactic Federation, put it this way:

“Guardianship by the Cetaceans can best be
described by observing the use of their ener¬
gies. Through the use of their rituals, their
sonar songs and their ocean travels, they vivify
the biosphere. Whale song has been found
throughout all the oceans of the world. It is
also found in, and resonates throughout, the
skies of the Earth. It exists even in the deepest
parts of Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Eu¬
rope. Because the energies of the Cetaceans
can be found both in the sky and in the water,
those great energies they bring forth in their
song create the resonance that sustains life”
(Nidle and Essene, 1994).

Further Reading

Nidle, Sheldon, and Virginia Essene, 1994. You Are Be -
coming a Galactic Human. Santa Clara, CA: Spiri¬
tual Education Endeavors Publishing Company.

“We Are the Cetaceans,” n.d. http://onelight.com/
ceta / cetabook/ cetmonitor.htm

Chaneques

Traditional belief holds that little people
known as Chaneques live in the forests and
jungles of Mexico and Central America,
guarding the spirits of wild animals and some¬
times causing harm to unlucky human beings.
The Chaneques are one variant of the beings
known under many names, including fairies
and elves. As with these traditions, Chaneque
lore consists not just of distant legends and
rumors but of claims of firsthand experiences.

Two English teachers from Mexico City in¬
vestigated some of these claims in the early
1970s. In the state of Veracruz, they inter¬
viewed sixteen persons who had alleged en¬
counters, either direct or through family
members (usually children), with these be¬
ings. One woman, for example, told them
that one day in March 1973, her son Ramiro,
three and a half years old, wandered from his
home in the village of La Tinaja. Searches
went on for six days without success. Finally,
the Chaneques informed a six-year-old neigh¬
bor that Ramiro was safe in a cave ten miles
away. When rescued at the designated place,
the boy was in excellent health, neither hun-

Channeling 59

gry nor thirsty. Though the entrance to the
cave was accessible only with difficulty, and
the searchers were scratched and bruised by
the time they got to him, the barefoot Ramiro
had no marks on him. He explained that
while playing by the river, he got lost. Five lit¬
tle men found him and fed him “sweet food”
and milk. He then fell asleep and woke up in
the cave, with one of the men still with him.
He and his companions, who came to the
cave on occasion, played together until the
rescue was accomplished.

Ricardo Gutierrez related that while walk¬
ing through a forest one day in June 1970, his
six-year-old nephew, Arturo, who had been
accompanying him, abruptly vanished. When
the boy failed to reappear, the local authorities
arrested Gutierrez for murder. Thirty-three
days later, as the man awaited trial, a healthy-
looking, unconcerned Arturo entered his
house. Asked where he had been, he said he
had been living with the little men. They fed
him food and honey-flavored milk and played
games with him. The investigators inter¬
viewed local police, who confirmed the mys¬
terious disappearance and the equally enig¬
matic reappearance.

Driving a six-ton truck between La Tinaja
and Tierra Blanca at 8 A.M. on May 22, 1973,
Manuel Angel Gonzalez suddenly saw five
small figures standing in the road in front of
him, holding their arms up in the air. He
slammed on the brakes barely in time to keep
from running into what he assumed were
small children. As he sat in his cab trying to
recover his wits, he had a chance to look more
closely at the figures. Now they looked like
adults, only two feet tall, perfectly propor¬
tioned, with light brown complexions and
black hair. He also realized that they had not
stepped out onto the road, but had material¬
ized there.

After a time he stepped out of the truck
and approached the figures. His action appar¬
ently frightened them because they scattered
into the dense undergrowth and fled in the di¬
rection of a nearby mountain. When Gonza¬
lez turned around to return to his vehicle, he

was dismayed to see blue flames consuming it.
Within half an hour it and its cargo—asbestos
sheeting, sacked cement, and reinforcing
steel—had been reduced to fused metal and
ash.

The story made the Mexican newspapers.
Soon afterward, the two investigators inter¬
viewed Gonzalez and his boss, who confirmed
the truck’s destruction, which neither could
explain; neither could the police officer who
was on the scene within an hour. Gonzalez
thought that the little men were not
Chaneques but “space travelers from some
other planet,” since Chaneques were not
known to cause pointless destruction.

See Also: Close encounters of the third kind; Fairies
encountered

Further Reading

Pantoja Lopez, Ramon A., and Robert Freeman
Bound, 1974. “Chaneques: Mexican Gnomes or
Interplanetary Visitors?” Fate 27, 11 (Novem¬
ber): 51-57.

Channeling

Channeling is new in name only. It refers to
the process whereby disembodied entities
communicate ideas and information through
human beings who are either in full waking
consciousness or in an altered state. The com¬
municating entities may be deceased persons,
gods, angels, extraterrestrials, extradimen-
sional intelligences, “ascended masters” (mys¬
tical adepts who have transcended physical ex¬
istence), nature spirits, and more. In earlier
times, channeling was called “revelation,” or
“mediumship.” Whatever the name, it is often
accompanied by visions of otherworldly enti¬
ties or unearthly realms. Some channelers be¬
lieve that through their consciousness alone,
they can travel through the universe and into
other dimensions.

In ancient times oracles and priests com¬
municated with the gods. The resulting divine
messages formed the basis of religious and
mystical faiths. Such communications often
involved prophecies as well. In the Judeo-
Christian tradition, the Bible documents vi¬
sions and messages recognizably related to the

60 Channeling

Gerry Bowman channeling the spirit of John the Baptist, August 15, 1987, Shasta National Forest, California (Roger
Ressmeyer/Corbis)

phenomenon of channeling. Channeling
seems ubiquitous in human experience. His¬
torically prominent practitioners include Nos¬
tradamus, Emanuel Swedenborg, Helena
Petrovna Blavatsky (founder of the theosophi-
cal movement), and Anna Lee (founder of the
Quaker sect known as the Shakers). In the lat¬
ter half of the nineteenth century, spiritualism
became the rage, and hundreds of mediums
claimed to be in contact with dead people
who, through the mediums, spoke with the
living. The communicators were not always
the deceased, however; in some cases space
people and other nonhuman intelligences
came through. Some mediums spoke of oth¬
erworldly journeys in their astral bodies.

After World War II, when flying saucers
entered the popular imagination, benevolent
extraterrestrial entities such as Ashtar and
Monka—starship commanders who came
here to oversee the transformation of the
human race into cosmic citizenship—chan¬
neled through individuals who became

known as contactees. As the channeling
movement grew, reaching its peak in the
1970s and 1980s during the height of the
New Age movement, channelers created a vast
alternative-reality literature, fusing traditional
occultism with modern science and pseudo¬
science. Some channeling entities made pre¬
dictions, often of some cataclysmic or other¬
wise seminal events, which inevitably went
unfulfilled. More typically, however, channel¬
ing consists of spiritual platitudes, self-help
suggestions, and unverifiable pronouncements
about the nature of spirit and cosmos.

To its critics, it is nothing more than a form
of automatism, “automatic behavior over
which an individual denies any personal con¬
trol” (Alcock, 1996). Its sources are within, not
outside, the channelers psyche. Parapsycholo¬
gist Rodger I. Anderson writes, “It has been in¬
creasingly evident to researchers that automa¬
tism of whatever kind is neither a psychic
ability nor a pathway to higher knowledge. Ap¬
pearances notwithstanding, it is only too clear

Chung Fu 61

in most cases that all the various elements that
go to make up the act of automatism are owed
solely to the automatist and his or her experi¬
ence in . . . life” (Anderson, 1988). On the
other hand, a skeptical but sympathetic ob¬
server, Brown University anthropologist
Michael F. Brown, defends channeling as, at its
best, “a lively arena for the free play of the reli¬
gious imagination. ... It is likely to remain a
site of emotional and spiritual renewal in a cul¬
ture that, perhaps more than any in human his¬
tory, promotes the continuous reinvention of
the self” (Brown, 1997).

See Also: Ascended Masters; Ashtar; Contactees;
Monka

Further Reading

Alcock, James E., 1996. “Channeling.” In Gordon
Stein, ed. The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal,
153—160. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Anderson, Rodger I., 1988. “Channeling.” Parapsy -
chology Review 19, 5 (1988): 6-9.

Brown, Michael F„ 1997. The Channeling Zone:
American Spirituality in an Anxious Age. Cam¬
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Klimo, Jon, 1987. Channeling: Investigations on Re -
ceiving Information from Paranormal Sources. Los
Angeles: Jeremy R Tarcher.

Riordan, Suzanne, 1990. “Channeling.” In J. Gor¬
don Melton, Jerome Clark, and Aidan A. Kelly,
eds. New Age Encyclopedia, 97-104. Detroit, MI:
Gale Research.

Chief Joseph

In life, Chief Joseph (1840-1894) led a group
of Nez Perce Indians and was admired in his
time by his people and whites, alike, for his wis¬
dom and courage. According to a Reston, Vir¬
ginia, channeler named John Cali, Joseph has
been communicating from beyond the grave
since 1992. Joseph delivers the familiar message
that Earth is going through physical and spiri¬
tual changes. Each individual must find the
God in him- or herself. Through Cali, Joseph
gives personal psychic readings to those seeking
guidance in their personal lives or metaphysical
odysseys. Joseph’s current messages are recorded
in an occasional e-newsletter, Sentinels of the Sky.

Further Reading

“Who Are Chief Joseph and John Cali?” http://www.
claimyourpower.com/sentinels/thechief.htm

Christopher

Jackie Altisi, also known as Jackie White Star,
channels messages from a variety of other¬
worldly entities, including the spirit of mar¬
tyred contactee Gloria Lee, who died in 1962
while fasting under the direction of space peo¬
ple. A principal communicator is Christopher,
an aide to the King of the Moon and
spokesman for the lunarian station of United
Cosmic Planets. According to Christopher,
the moon is a “complete authority in itself,
but working with an interplanetary confeder¬
ation.” These messages are circulated through
the Star Light Fellowship, established in 1962.
See Also: J.W.

Further Reading

Melton, J. Gordon, 1996. Encyclopedia of American
Religions. Fifth edition. Detroit, MI: Gale Re¬
search.

Chung Fu

Sometime in the 1960s, Marshall Lever, then a
student at a Presbyterian seminary, began ex-

Photograph of Chief Joseph by Edward Curtis (Corbis)

62 Close encounters of the third kind

perimenting with trance mediumship. In this
state he heard from Chung Fu, a spirit guide
who in his last physical incarnation was a stu¬
dent of Lao-Tzu in China. In 1970, Lever and
his wife, Quinta, established the Circle of
Inner Truth to facilitate Chung Fu’s teachings,
which focused on spiritual development as the
way to break out of the reincarnation cycle.
These efforts included such quotidian matters
as diet, health care, and psychological well¬
being, on which Chung Fu would offer guid¬
ance in sittings with individuals.

The Levers traveled widely, abandoning
any permanent residence, to work for Chung
Fu. Inner Circles took roots in several Ameri¬
can cities, and one operated out of London.
Finally, Chung Fu was heard from no more,
and by the latter 1980s, the movement no
longer existed.

Further Reading

Melton, J. Gordon, 1996. Encyclopedia of American
Religions. Fifth edition. Detroit, MI: Gale Re¬
search.

Close encounters of the third kind

In The UFO Experience (1972), J. Allen
Hynek, a Northwestern University as¬
tronomer and former scientific consultant to
the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book, pro¬
posed a classification system for UFO sight¬
ings, including three varieties of close encoun¬
ters. He defined “close encounters of the third
kind” as those “in which the presence of ani¬
mated creatures is reported.” Prior to the
coining of the phrase (shortened to “CE3”),
ufologists had called these “occupant reports.”

The modem UFO phenomenon is two
centuries old. In the early nineteenth century
the first reports of arguably UFO-like phe¬
nomena were recorded in scientific journals,
newspaper accounts, and other sources,
though such stories were relatively rare until
late in the century, when alleged sightings of
mysterious “airships” filled American newspa¬
pers between November 1896 and May 1897.
Many were hoaxes, some concocted by the
press itself. Among them were claims that the

airships had landed. Reflecting a widely held
belief that an ingenious American inventor
had built the ships and that the occupants
were human, some reports even gave the in¬
ventor a name, Wilson. Other accounts, how¬
ever, described grotesque aliens, sometimes
thought to be from Mars. “Hoax” probably is
too strong a word to characterize these tall
tales, which were apparently meant as jokes to
amuse a readership that was not fooled.

After 1947—the year “flying saucers” and
“unidentified flying objects” entered popular
consciousness—a number of seemingly sin¬
cere individuals came forward to speak of en¬
counters they had experienced in earlier
years, some reaching as far back as 1893,
when a man in the Australian state of New
South Wales told a newspaper that he had
seen a saucer-shaped structure land on his
farm. When he went to investigate, an oddly
dressed man stepped out of the craft holding
a device that resembled a “torch” (flashlight).
He aimed the device at the witness, who saw
a light shoot out from it and hit his hand.
He was knocked unconscious. When he
awoke, the object and occupant were gone.
For the rest of his life, he claimed, his hand
was paralyzed.

New Zealand newspapers of 1909 recorded
a local airship-sighting wave, including an in¬
cident in which a witness saw three figures in
a craft passing overhead. One shouted at him
in an unfamiliar language. In the United
States, early on the morning of February 29,
1916, according to a report in the Superior
Telegram that same day, workers along the
Lake Superior dock in Wisconsin saw a “big
machine ... 50 feet wide and 100 feet long”
fly by at a high rate of speed about six hun¬
dred feet in the air. Workers said they had
seen three “men” inside the craft. This is the
first known, seemingly credible, CE3 to be
published at the time of its occurrence.

A newspaper referred to these mysterious
craft by the name “flying saucers” for the first
time on June 26, 1947, two days after private
pilot Kenneth Arnold saw nine discs maneu¬
vering over the Cascade Mountains. This re-

Close encounters of the third kind 63

ported account ushered in the UFO age. The
same afternoon as Arnold’s sighting, Oregon
farmer Bill Schuening claimed to have seen a
spherical object hovering five or six feet above
a field. Just beneath it were “two little guys in
green suits with white helmets” (McCune,
1987). They were no more than three feet tall.
A few seconds later they vanished. Schuening
did not see them enter the craft, which then
flew off toward the Cascades.

In the early UFO era, however, such re¬
ports, relatively rare but hardly nonexistent,
received little attention. In 1950, when the
first book with “flying saucers” in its title,
Donald E. Keyhoe’s paperback The Flying
Saucers Are Real, saw print, the occupants of
the vehicles—Keyhoe believed them to be
peaceable extraterrestrials who deliberately re¬
frained from contact—could only be specu¬
lated about. Another book published that
same year, Frank Scully’s Behind the Flying
Saucers, asserted that the U.S. government
had recovered crashed spacecraft, containing
the bodies of little men “dressed in the style of
the 1890s” and believed to be from Venus.
(Subsequent investigations determined that
two veteran confidence artists had concocted
these tales in order to peddle bogus oil-detec¬
tion devices tied to advanced extraterrestrial
technology.) Scully’s notorious book had the
effect of leading some early ufologists—as op¬
posed to the saucerians who embraced the
contactee movement—to shy away from any
reports of humanoids, whatever the source.

A significant proportion of the reports de¬
scribed the occupants as humanoids. The spe¬
cific descriptions may have varied, but wit¬
nesses mostly testified that UFO occupants
had two arms, two legs, and generally human¬
like head and facial features. Usually the be¬
ings were small. Sometimes they were
grotesque-looking. Sometimes they looked
like small humans. A minority were of normal
human height, and a few were said to be more
than that, seven or eight feet tall. Such reports
came from all over the world, including re¬
mote Third World locations where UFOs
were little known and the occupants were

sometimes taken to be American or Russian
pilots. A wave of humanoid and other en¬
counters in France in the fall of 1954 received
international attention and caused even the
most cautious UFO researchers to reconsider
their bias against CE3 reports. In the summer
of 1955, the air force’s Project Blue Book in¬
vestigated a bizarre episode in which members
of a rural Kentucky family claimed to have
spent a night besieged by floating, big-eared
humanoid entities from a UFO.

CE3s were different from the contact
claims of George Adamski, Floward Menger,
George Van Tassel, and other 1950s con-
tactees in some important ways. For one, the
beings seldom looked much like the golden¬
haired, angelic spacemen and spacewomen
who figured in the contactees’ tales. For an¬
other, they had little if anything to say. Com¬
munication, if any (and there seldom was),
was brief, sometimes enigmatic, and always
devoid of inspirational content. Unlike con¬
tactees, CE3 witnesses fit the profile of wit¬
nesses to less exotic UFO phenomena; in
other words, they were ordinary citizens with¬
out a background in occultism and other eso¬
teric pursuits, as contactees tended to be.
They also did not embark on lecture tours or
write books, as the more flamboyant con¬
tactees did.

A spectacular CE3 took place over Boianai,
Papua New Guinea, in late June 1959. The
best-known witness, the Rev. William Booth
Gill, was an Anglican missionary from Aus¬
tralia. On the evening of June 26, thirty-eight
persons observed a large, disc-shaped craft
with four legs hovering in the northwestern
sky. Gill estimated its apparent size to be that
of five full moons lined up end to end. At the
top of the UFO, behind a glass-covered cock¬
pit, four humanlike figures, surrounded by il¬
lumination, moved back and forth, appar¬
ently working at an unknown task. The object
and its crew ascended into gathering clouds
after forty-five minutes. Other UFOs, though
not their occupants, were intermittently visi¬
ble over the next three and a half hours.
Twenty five of the witnesses signed a state-

64 Close encounters of the third kind

ment attesting to what they had seen that
night. At 6 P.M. the next day, the original
UFO and its crew returned. At one point dur¬
ing the observation, Gill and others waved to
the occupants, who waved back. The objects
showed up for the last time the next night,
though no beings were visible.

Interviewed in 1973 byj. Allen Hynek, na¬
tive witnesses stuck by the story. Gill, who left
the country in September 1959, stands by the
report even today. It remains among the most
impressive and puzzling of CE3s.

Far stranger and much harder to believe
was the testimony of a young Brazilian, Anto¬
nio Villas-Boas. Villas-Boas came to the atten¬
tion of ufologists in November 1957, when he
wrote a letter to a journalist who had written
about UFOs. Soon afterward, the journalist,
Joao Martins, brought Villas-Boas to Rio de
Janeiro, where he and physician/ufologist
Olavo T. Fontes, of the National School of
Medicine of Brazil, interviewed and examined
him. The young man claimed that in the early
morning hours of October 16, occupants of a
UFO took him into the ship and left him
alone in a room. A naked, essentially human¬
looking young woman soon joined him there,
eventually engaging with him in two sex acts.
Before leaving, she made a gesture that led
Villas-Boas to believe she would bear his child
on another world.

Martins and Fontes judged Villas-Boas to
be sane and sincere. His intelligence and re¬
fusal to speculate on the incident made a posi¬
tive impression. “In spite of this,” Fontes
wrote, “the very substance of his story be¬
comes the heaviest argument against it”
(Lorenzen and Lorenzen, 1967). In 1962 two
representatives of a Brazilian UFO group
went to Villas-Boas’s village to speak with
him. Though desiring no publicity, he spoke,
if reluctantly, about the experience. The inves¬
tigators published an account of the interview
in an English-language version of their bul¬
letin, but it attracted little notice. Fontes’s
1958 report circulated privately among a few
English-speaking ufologists, but because of its
sexual nature no one would publish it. For

Antonio Villas-Boas being medically examinedfollowing
his abdtiction by a UFO in Brazil, October 15, 1957
(Fortean Picture Library)

most ufologists, the Villas-Boas episode was
only a vague rumor, if that, until England’s
widely read Flying Saucer Review carried a se¬
ries of articles on it, beginning in its Janu¬
ary/February 1965 issue.

The Villas-Boas case anticipated an escala¬
tion of the strangeness quotient of the CE3
phenomenon. On April 18, 1961, Joe Simon-
ton of rural Eagle River, Wisconsin, was eat¬
ing lunch when, so he would assert, a flying
saucer landed on his driveway. He went out¬
side just as a hatchway opened. A short, dark-
featured man, dressed in a black, two-piece
suit and wearing a tight-fitting cap on his
head, held a jug. From his gestures Simonton
inferred that he wanted the jug to be filled
with water. He complied. As he handed the
filled jug back to the man, he glanced inside
the ship and saw two other men. One was sit¬
ting in front of a flameless grill, cooking
something. When Simonton asked if they
were eating, the man with the jug handed him
four fresh “pancakes,” and then the flying
saucer departed. Simonton took a bite of one

Close encounters of the third kind 65

of the pancakes. It tasted like cardboard, he
thought.

The story of the Eagle River pancakes at¬
tracted national attention and a torrent of
ridicule. Even UFO groups disagreed on its
significance, some championing Simonton as a
na'ive, sincere witness to an extraordinary
event, while the conservative National Investi¬
gations Committee on Aerial Phenomena
(NICAP) sneeringly dismissed the story as an
absurd contact claim. Even Project Blue Book
got drawn into the case, sending Dr. Hynek to
the site to interview Simonton and local peo¬
ple. Few of Simonton’s friends and acquain¬
tances deemed him a hoaxer or even a man
with sufficient imagination to make up such
an outlandish tale. Still, laboratory analysis
found nothing out of the ordinary in the pan¬
cake sample it examined. In common with just
about everybody else who looked closely at the
claim, the air force ended up confused, stating
at one point that Simonton was a “balanced
person of good mental health,” and, at an¬
other, that he had suffered “an hallucination
followed with delusion” (Malian, 1967). Sepa¬
rately, a lone witness and a nearby farm family
reported seeing a UFO over Simonton’s resi¬
dence, in the first case, at the time of the sup¬
posed landing; in the second, the next evening.

Cases such as Villas-Boas’s and Simonton’s
suggested a degree of communication be¬
tween witnesses and UFO beings. To some
ufologists, many never very enthusiastic about
CE3s to start with, that suggested the de¬
spised contactees, even if neither man acted
much like one. These ufologists were more
comfortable with a CE3 report from Socorro,
New Mexico, on April 24, 1964, from Lonnie
Zamora, a police officer of undisputed relia¬
bility. Around 6 P.M. Zamora spotted a small,
egg-shaped UFO resting in an isolated area on
the city’s outskirts. Close to the object were
two small figures dressed in white coveralls,
apparently examining the craft. On seeing
Zamora, they ran behind the craft and disap¬
peared. The flame-spewing UFO departed
with a roar. Police, Project Blue Book, and
civilian investigators found burn marks and

impressions at the site. Despite its hostility to
UFOs and its tendency to reach for some¬
times far-fetched “conventional” explanations
for reports, Project Blue Book declared the
case an “unknown.” It has since become a
classic UFO incident, often cited by those
who argue for the anomalous nature of the
phenomenon.

If Zamora’s experience seemed relatively
straightforward, Gary Wilcox’s claimed en¬
counter of the same day and a few hours ear¬
lier appeared as bizarre as Villas-Boas’s and Si¬
monton’s, though not much like either in any
other context. Wilcox, a young Newark Val¬
ley, New York, dairy farmer, asserted that he
had spoken with two short, spacesuit-clad
UFO occupants for two hours. They said that
they were part of a Martian expedition,
Wilcox said, engaged in Earth exploration.
Wilcox’s story did not come to light until a

Police Officer Lonnie Zamora, who saw a UFO land near
Socorro, Neiv Mexico, April24, 1964 (Fortean Picture
Library)

66 Close encounters of the third kind

few days later, since he had sought no public¬
ity and discussed it only with friends and fam¬
ily members, who eventually leaked it to the
local press. Like Simonton, Wilcox had an
unimpeachable reputation among locals, and
psychological testing revealed no abnormali¬
ties. Wilcox made no subsequent attempt to
exploit his story. Though his testimony made
no sense—even in 1964 scientists had aban¬
doned the hope of an inhabited Mars—
Wilcox seemed neither crazy nor dishonest.

As comparable claims came to the fore,
some ufologists speculated that UFO occu¬
pants were lying to hide their true identity
and purpose. At the extreme this led theorists
such as John A. Keel and Jacques Yallee to
move beyond ufology’s venerable extraterres¬
trial hypothesis (ETH) and into quasi-de-
monological speculation about earthbound el-
ementals and other occult entities.

As if to compound the confusion, by the
mid-1960s ufologists were confronting a new
level of confrontation and contact between
humans and UFO beings. In 1965, under
hypnosis conducted by a Boston psychiatrist,
a New Hampshire couple, Barney and Betty
Hill, turned a consciously recalled CE3 (an
observation of figures aboard a hovering UFO
one night in September 1961) into an on¬
board experience, including medical examina¬
tion by gray-skinned aliens and conversation
with the ship’s captain. All of this took place
during a two-hour period of which the Hills
had no conscious memory and for which they
had never been able to account; to them it
had always been a puzzling period of seem¬
ingly inexplicable amnesia. “Missing time,”
hypnotic regressions, gray aliens, and medical
examinations would play large roles in the
emerging abduction phenomenon.

A drawing by a pupil at Ariel Primary School in Ruwa, Zimbabwe, where a group of children saw a UFO and aliens land
on September 16, 1994 (Fortean Picture Library)

Cocoon people 67

In time, such abduction reports—the sub¬
ject of a separate entry—would overwhelm
CE3s as historically understood. Nonabduc¬
tion CE3s would diminish in number and, in
time, slow to a trickle, though they would not
entirely disappear.

One particularly well-documented inci¬
dent reportedly occurred in the early morn¬
ing hours of January 12, 1975, when sev-
enty-two-year-old George O’Barski was
driving home past New York City’s North
Hudson Park. He observed a glowing pan¬
cake-shaped object hovering above the park
ground. A door opened, a ladder emerged,
and about ten small figures, dressed in one-
piece suits and helmets, climbed down to
collect soil and grass samples, which they
scooped up with “little shovels” (Hopkins,
1981). An extensive investigation by three
New York-based ufologists uncovered a body
of apparent confirming testimony from an
assortment of witnesses.

In the most remarkable CE3 of the 1990s,
a large group of children at Ariel School,
Ruwa, Zimbabwe, while on recess on the
morning of September 16, 1994, reportedly
observed the landing of a UFO just beyond
the playground. They also saw one or two oc¬
cupants, small figures (slightly more than
three feet tall) with large, slanted eyes and
long black hair. They were wearing tight black
suits. Though teachers were alerted while the
incident was in progress, none believed the
children and refused to go outside. Later, they
changed their minds as the children produced
remarkably uniform accounts and drawings.
A British Broadcasting Corporation journal¬
ist, accompanied by Zimbabwe ufologist Cyn¬
thia Hind, interviewed the witnesses within a
few days of the incident.

See Also: Abductions by UFOs; Adamski, George;
Contactees; Keel, John Alva; Menger, Howard;
Van Tassel, George W; Wilcox’s Martians

Further Reading

Basterfield, Keith, 1997. UFOs: A Report on Aus -
tralian Encounters. Kew, Victoria, Australia: Reed
Books.

Bowen, Charles, ed., 1974. The Humanoids. Lon¬
don: Futura Publications.

Clark, Jerome, 1998. “Close Encounters of the Third
Kind.” In Jerome Clark. The UFO Encyclopedia:
The Phenomenon from the Beginning, 207-239.
Detroit, MI: Omnigraphics.

-, 2000. “The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis in

the Early UFO Age.” In David M. Jacobs, ed.,
UFOs and Abductions: Challenging the Borders of
Knowledge, 122-140. Lawrence: University Press
of Kansas.

Fuller, John G., 1966. The Interrupted Journey: Two
Lost Hours “Aboard a Flying Saucer. ” New York:
Dial Press.

Hind, Cynthia, 1996. UFOs over Africa. Madison,
WI: Horus House Press.

Hopkins, Budd, 1981. Missing Time: A Documented
Study of UFO Abductions. New York: Richard
Marek Publishers.

Hynek, J. Allen, 1972. The UFO Experience: A Scien -
tific Inquiry. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company.

Hynek, J. Allen, and Jacques Vallee, 1975. The Edge
of Reality: A Progress Report on Unidentified Flying
Objects. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company.

Keyhoe, Donald E., 1950. The Flying Saucers Are
Real. New York: Fawcett Publishers.

Lorenzen, Coral, and Jim Lorenzen, 1967. Flying
Saucer Occupants. New York: Signet.

McCune, Hal, 1987. “Man Sticks to His Report.”
Pendleton East Oregonian (June 24).

Malian, Lloyd, 1967. “UFO Hoaxes and Hallucina¬
tions.” Science and Mechanics 38, 3 (March):
48-52, 82-85.

Scully, Frank, 1950. Behind the Flying Saucers. New
York: Henry Holt and Company.

Cocoon people

In her book Taken (1994), the late psycholo¬
gist and abductee Karla Turner recounts the
experiences of a woman identified only as Pat,
at the time a fifty-year-old divorcee living in
Florida. Her abduction experiences began in
1954 on the family farm near Floyd’s Knob,
Indiana. Over the years other experiences oc¬
curred. All of these were repressed in con¬
scious memory until 1986, when they came
flooding into her thoughts. One memory—
Pat could not put a specific time frame on
it—concerned “cocoon people.”

She found herself inside a large room with
soft white lighting. A gray-skinned humanoid
stood near her. “I vaguely recall seeing a
human male there,” she would tell Turner,
“but not what he was doing.” The room con-

68 Contactees

tained a number of boxes that looked like sar¬
cophagi (stone coffins). Inside them she could
see what looked like human forms, alive but
not moving, covered with “white misty stuff,”
which somehow she knew kept them alive. In
a telepathic communication, the being asked
if she wanted to see “yours.” When she said
yes, the being showed her a container with a
human female inside.

“Don’t ask how I knew it was female,” she
said. “I just felt it. I saw a little bit of human
face through the mist, like a nose, mouth, eyes,
definitely human. I knew this was connected
with the 1954 visit, because I remembered
they told me they were making a ‘new me.’”
When she and the others were resurrected or
reanimated, she thought, “we will all be able to
see and talk with them here in the body. ... If
I were to die now, I believe that my ‘other
body’ will house my soul when Jesus says it is
time, and I, too, will come back.”

See Also: Abductions by UFOs

Further Reading

Turner, Karla, 1994. Taken: Inside the Alien-Human
Abduction Agenda. Roland, AR: Kelt Works.

Contactees

Contactees are people who claim a regular,
ongoing relationship with benevolent extra¬
terrestrials, sometimes called Space Brothers.
These aliens—essentially angels in space-
suits—are nearly always human in appear¬
ance, except better looking than humans are.
They espouse an occult philosophy with rec¬
ognizably terrestrial origins, notably in Theos¬
ophy. Contact occurs in a variety of fashions.
Much, perhaps most, of it is through channel¬
ing. Other psychic communications are ef¬
fected through automatic writing, dreams, vi¬
sions, or astral (out-of-body) travel. A third
group, the most controversial, alleges physical
contacts, including trips in flying saucers to
other worlds. Physical contactees frequently
offer “evidence” of their experiences in the
form of artifacts or photographs. Persons who
follow contactees and embrace their message
are sometimes called “saucerians.”

The contactee movement overlaps to a de¬
gree with the UFO movement—ufology—
but the two differ in fundamental ways. To
saucerians, there are no unidentified flying ob¬
jects. Flying saucers’ nature, origin, and pur¬
pose are known; they are here to educate hu¬
mans to their larger cosmic destiny, to prepare
them for the coming Earth changes generated
by nuclear war, geological upheavals, polar
shifts, or combinations thereof. To ufologists,
UFOs are unknowns, probably of extraordi¬
nary origin, but fundamentally a phenome¬
non that will eventually yield its secrets to sci¬
ence via conventional investigative and
analytic procedures. Another way to express
the difference is to see saucerianism as a kind
of popular religious movement, ufology as a
popular (if often naive) attempt at scientific
inquiry. Traditionally, ufologists have func¬
tioned as the contactee movement’s fiercest
critics.

The contactee movement envisions a
densely populated cosmos with hosts of ad¬
vanced, wise space people linked in a kind of
celestial United Nations, usually called the
Galactic Federation or something like it. A
minority of evil extraterrestrials opposes the
Federation’s benevolent mission. Both sides
have representatives on Earth, individuals
who pass as normal earthlings but who are in
fact aliens. Many were placed here generations
ago and have lived on this planet through
many incarnations, patiently waiting to be ac¬
tivated when the time of transition—which
will include mass landings of spaceships—
comes.

There were contactees before there were
flying saucers. Perhaps the first of them was
the Swedish scientist and mystic Emanuel
Swedenborg (1688-1772). In Earths in the
Solar World (1758), Swedenborg wrote of his
astral travels to the moon and other planets.
Each of these worlds, Swedenborg asserted,
is inhabited, and he described, at length, the
people and civilizations there. In the nine¬
teenth century, with the rise of the spiritual¬
ist movement, psychic communications with
extraterrestrials, most often Martians, were

Contactees 69

recorded on occasion. The most famous such
case became the subject of a pioneering book
in the emerging discipline of abnormal psy¬
chology, Theodore Flournoys From India to
the Planet Mars (1899). In various states of
altered consciousness, a woman given the
pseudonym Helene Smith (Catherine Elise
Muller) interacted with persons from the
Red Planet, which she also visited astrally.
She produced a Martian language that
Flournoy identified as an “infantile travesty
of French” (Flournoy, 1963).

Reflecting a belief popularized by Ameri¬
can astronomer Percival Lowell, Smith/Muller
“saw” canals on the Martian surface. Her
story, like those of Swedenborg and the con¬
tactees of the saucer era, mirrored astronomi¬
cal and other scientific theories of the period.
Within a few years, the notion of a Martian
canal system would be thoroughly debunked.
In the late 1940s and into the 1950s, it was
still vaguely possible, some astronomers
thought, that some neighboring planets (most
likely Mars and Venus) could harbor intelli¬
gent life. Perhaps not surprisingly, the aliens
in contact lore often hailed from our immedi¬
ate vicinity. After space probes in the 1960s
established, beyond further rational discus¬
sion, that beyond Earth there are no planets
hospitable to life in this system, the extrater¬
restrials in contact claims were placed farther
out in the cosmos. Either that, or the Venus,
Mars, Saturn, and other solar planets said to
harbor advanced civilizations became etheric
counterparts, existing on a higher vibratory
rate and distinct from the lifeless worlds we
know.

Another influential early book was Oahspe
(1882), the product of automatic writing at
the guidance of angels, or so New York oc¬
cultist John Ballou Newbrough asserted.
Written between January and December
1881, the book is a mystical account of the
cosmos, its history, and its inhabitants. The
book stayed in print for decades and was
widely read in contactee circles, where
ashars —guardian angels who fly spirit ships—
became extraterrestrials in spacecraft. Indeed,

the ubiquitous starship commander and chan¬
neling entity Ashtar may owe his name and
occupation to Newbrough’s creation.

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891),
who founded Theosophy, wrote of a hierarchy
of “ascended masters,” including the Venus-
based “Lords of the Flame.” In the 1930s the
flamboyant, fascist-oriented Guy Warren Bal¬
lard marketed a simplified, popular version of
Blavatsky’s doctrine. He spoke of his own
meeting with twelve Venusian “masters” in the
Teton mountains in Wyoming. Religious
studies scholar J. Gordon Melton identifies
Ballard (who died in 1939) and his I AM
movement as crucial to the development of
the later contactee movement. “Not only did
Ballard become the first to actually build a re¬
ligion on contact with extraterrestrials,” he
writes, “but his emphasis was placed upon fre¬
quent contact with the masters from whom he
received regular messages to the followers of
the world contactee movement. The move¬
ment took over the I AM [spiritual] hierarchy
and changed it into a space command hierar¬
chy” (Melton, 1995).

In The Book of the Damned (1919), the first
volume ever written on the subject that would
eventually be called ufology, Charles Fort
(1874-1932) speculated that strange lights
and constructions observed in the sky and
space during the previous century could be
evidence of visitation from other worlds. He
also advanced the possibly tongue-in-cheek
speculation that, perhaps, some human beings
were secretly in contact with the occupants of
such vehicles.

The first explicit contact in the context of a
UFO sighting occurred on the evening of Oc¬
tober 9, 1946, over San Diego. Many resi¬
dents had gone outside in anticipation of a
predicted meteor shower. Among them was
medium Mark Probert, who channeled cos¬
mic philosophy from a group of discarnates,
including a 500,000-year-old Tibetan named
the Yada Di’ Shi’ite. He worked with occult
theorist N. Meade Layne, who the year before
had founded Borderland Sciences Research
Associates. Probert and many others wit-

70 Contactees

nessed something that, whatever else it may or
may not have been, was not a meteor. Ob¬
servers would describe it as resembling a huge
bullet-shaped object with batlike wings and a
searchlight that it occasionally swept over the
ground. Dark, except for two red lights along
its side, it stayed in view for an hour and a
half, moving at both slow and fast speeds.

During the sighting, Probert phoned
Layne, who urged him to see if the craft’s oc¬
cupants were interested in a telepathic ex¬
change. According to Probert, the experiment
succeeded. The crew members revealed them¬
selves as peaceful people with lightweight, il¬
luminated bodies. They had been trying to
contact earthlings for many years. Though
they were afraid to land openly, they would
meet with scientists in some isolated area or
on a mountaintop. They had mastered anti¬
gravity, and their ship was called the Kareeta.
The San Diego Union carried a humorous
piece on the sighting, including Probert’s as¬
sertions, in its October 18 issue.

The UFO age began the next year with
private pilot Kenneth Arnold’s June 24 sight¬
ing of nine shiny objects that the press would
soon call “flying saucers.” In the wake of
Arnold’s report, many other people came for¬
ward to recount their own encounters with
unknown aerial phenomena. Among the
most outlandish claims to see print was one
told by Ole J. Sneide. In a letter to the San
Francisco Chronicle appearing in the July 3
issue, Sneide stated that the flying discs, also
known as flying saucers, were spaceships from
other planets. (This is one of the very earliest
public attempts to link the new public sensa¬
tion with extraterrestrial visitors. Nearly all
other speculation held the saucers to be natu¬
ral phenomena or advanced terrestrial air¬
craft. The association of flying saucers as
spaceships did not take widespread hold until
the early to mid-1950s.) Sneide also said the
saucers had a base on the dark side of the
moon. He knew as much because he regularly
teleported himself around the galaxy. A fol¬
low-up article in the Chronicle determined
that Sneide, a student of occultism, was seri¬

ous. Though nothing more is known about
Sneide, he may have been something of a
contactee before the word and concept had
come into currency.

The contact movement, however, did not
emerge into cultural visibility until January
1952, when aircraft mechanic George W Van
Tassel began holding open weekly meetings in
the high-desert country of southern Califor¬
nia. At these gatherings Van Tassel would
channel messages from starship (“ventla”)
commanders, introducing, among others, the
destined-to-be ubiquitous Ashtar. That same
year, Van Tassel published I Rode a Flying
Saucer!, the first modern contactee book (al¬
beit with a misleading title; it would not be
until the next year that Van Tassel would
claim his first physical contact and spaceship¬
boarding). The year 1952 saw a flurry of con¬
tact activity. In Prescott, Arizona, George
Hunt Williamson, his wife, Betty, and com¬
panions were communicating with Martians,
Uranians, and other extraterrestrials from the
solar system via ouija board, radio, and men¬
tal telepathy. In July, in the Nevada desert,
Truman Bethurum met the crew of a “scow”
from the planet Clarion, invisible to earthly
eyes because it is always on the opposite side
of the sun from Earth.

Though arguably Van Tassel was the most
influential of the first generation of contactees,
the most famous was George Adamski.
Adamski had a long history in California—
going back to the 1930s—as a kind of minor
guru. When flying saucers rose to prominence
in the late 1940s, Adamski produced photo¬
graphs of spaceships in the atmosphere and
near the moon. On November 20, 1952, ac¬
companied by six associates, including George
Hunt Williamson, he went out into the desert
to meet a landed saucer and its pilot, a blond¬
haired, angelic figure whom Adamski would
call Orthon. Adamski went on to write books,
lecture all over the world, and become the
single most controversial saucer personality of
the 1950s. Though despised by conservative
ufologists, who charged that his accounts of
meetings with Venusians, Martians, and Satur-

Contactees 71

UFO contactee George Adamski (left) being interviewed on television by Long John Nebel (Fortean Picture Library)

nians amounted to bad science fiction, he was
also widely revered.

In August 1953, more than ten thousand
persons attended the Interplanetary Spacecraft
Convention at Van Tassel’s residence in Giant
Rock, California. The speakers were mostly
the new contactee stars. The movement was
growing rapidly, becoming a worldwide phe¬
nomenon. It also produced a small library of
books and newsletters. Over the course of the
next few years, other contactees rose to occult
celebrity. Many were physical contactees, but,
in time, channelers and automatic writers—
most of whom did not seek publicity or
profit—dominated the ranks.

Not everyone was willing to take the space
people at their word. Channeling contactee
Trevor James Constable warned that some of
them were demons in disguise. Some years
later, occult-oriented ufologist John A. Keel
wrote, “The demons, devils, and false angels
were recognized as liars and plunderers by

early man. These same impostors now appear
as long-haired Venusians” (Keel, 1970).
Christian fundamentalist authors of UFO
books expressed similar suspicions.

Adamski s death in April 1965 marked the
passing of the era of the physical contactees.
Even so, the most successful contactee of later
years was himself a physical contactee, Eduard
“Billy” Meier, a rural Swiss man with a back¬
ground in the esoteric. Like Adamski and his
first-generation counterparts, Meier put forth
photographs, artifacts, and allegedly confir¬
matory testimony to back up his stories of in-
the-flesh meetings with space people and of
rides in their spacecraft. Meier’s extraterrestri¬
als are from the Pleiades star system. But like
Adamski’s Venusians, they are handsome and
beautiful, with blond hair and a generally
northern European appearance. Unlike Adam¬
ski’s and just about everybody else’s space peo¬
ple, Meier’s have a specifically antireligious
message; the Pleiadeans, according to Meier,

72 Cosmic Awareness

believe only in the laws of nature. It is also
safe to say that unlike other contactees,
Meier—a keen businessman—has reaped a
significant, and continuing, financial reward
from his supposed experiences. He has also
been at the receiving end of criticism and de¬
bunking efforts. After divorcing him, his ex-
wife told investigators that his claims are
without factual basis.

In the United States, a major force in the
movement has been the annual Rocky Moun¬
tain Conference on UFO Investigation, which
has taken up where the Giant Rock conven¬
tions (the last held in 1977) left off. Started in
1980 by R. Leo Sprinkle, a psychologist and
counselor at the University of Wyoming, it
meets once a year, usually in the summer, and
attracts contactees from all over, though most
are from ranches, farms, and small towns of
the Great Plains, underscoring the folk or
ground-level nature of the movement.

Contactees are different from abductees—
whose experiences became known only in the
1960s and did not become a major part of the
UFO controversy until the 1980s—in several
ways. A principal difference is that abductees
tend to fit the profile of ordinary citizens, in
other words, people without a background in
occultism; in that way, they are also like most
witnesses to UFOs. Abductees also report
being taken against their will, and many con¬
sider the experience traumatic. Most do not
claim to have attained superior wisdom from
the experience, and most assert that their
communications with their captors were de¬
void of messages of cosmic uplift. Yet in time
contactee-oriented writers and investigators
began to see abductions as contacts by other
means. Some abductees come to accept their
experiences as painful but necessary learning
experiences. Harvard University psychiatrist
John E. Mack, whose study of abduction re¬
ports has convinced him that the aliens have
benevolent intentions, has stated, “If, in fact,
the alien beings are closer to the divine source
or anima mundi than human beings generally
seem to be . . . their presence among us, how¬
ever cruel and traumatic in some instances,

may be part of a larger process that is bringing
us back to God” (Mack, 1994).

See Also: Abductions by UFOs; Adamski, George;
Ascended Masters; Ashtar; Bethurum, Truman;
Channeling; Keel, John Alva; Meier, Eduard
“Billy”; Orthon; Sprinkle, Ronald Leo; Van Tas¬
sel, George W; Williamson, George Hunt

Further Reading

Adamski, George, 1955. Inside the Space Ships. New
York: Abelard-Schuman.

Bartholomew, Robert E., and George S. Howard,
1998. UFOs and Alien Contact: Two Centuries of
Mystery. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Bord, Janet, and Colin Bord, 1991. Life beyond
Planet Earth? Man’s Contacts with Space People.
London: GraftonBooks.

Curran, Douglas, 1985. In Advance of the Landing:
Folk Concepts of Outer Space. New York: Abbeville
Press.

Flournoy, Theodore, 1963. From India to the Planet
Mars: A Study of a Case of Somnambulism. Trans¬
lated reprint of 1899 edition. New Hyde Park,
NY: University Books.

Keel, John A., 1970. UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse.
New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

Mack, John E„ 1994. Abdtiction: Human Encounters
with Aliens. New York: Charles Scribners Sons.

Melton, J. Gordon, 1995. “The Contactees: A Sur¬
vey.” In James R. Lewis, ed. The Gods Have
Landed: New Religions from Other Worlds, 1-13.
Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Reeve, Bryant, and Helen Reeve, 1957. Flying Saucer
Pilgrimage. Amherst, WI: Amherst Press.

Stupple, David W, 1994. “Historical Links Between
the Occult and Flying Saucers.” Journal of UFO
Studies 5 (new series): 93-108.

Cosmic Awareness

“Cosmic Awareness” first spoke in 1962
through a retired army officer, William
Durby, who harbored metaphysical interests.
When asked who or what it was, Cosmic
Awareness said it was a “total mind that is not
any unity other than that of universality”
(Melton, 1996). The following year an organ¬
ization was formed around the communica¬
tions in response to specific instructions from
Awareness to that effect.

After Duby died in 1967, the organization
split into seven factions, all at odds over which
heretofore-secret teachings should be made
public and which should be kept only among

Cottingley fairies 73

members. Out of the strife Cosmic Awareness
Communications, which had the strongest
links to the earliest group, emerged the
strongest. Based in Olympia, Washington, it
survives today and maintains a sometimes
controversial presence on the New Age scene.

Its head, Paul Shockley, continues to chan¬
nel teachings from Awareness. His organiza¬
tion characterizes Awareness as “the Force that
expressed Itself through Jesus of Nazareth, the
Buddha, Krishna, Mohammed and other
great avatars who served as ‘Channels’ for
what is commonly known as ‘God,’ and
which expresses Itself once again as the world
begins to enter the New Age of spiritual con¬
sciousness and awareness” (“Cosmic Aware¬
ness Communications,” 1994).

Awareness teaches that the United States of
America came into being through interven¬
tion with the Founding Fathers. The motive
was to allow personal freedom, which would
accelerate the process of change through
which human beings must go to be reunited
with Awareness. The result will be a “United
States of Awareness, where entities no longer
feel trapped by the physical plane, but may re¬
alize their true identity as being cosmic beings
of life, light and energy” (“Cosmic Awareness
Introduces Itself,” n.d.).

Further Reading

“Cosmic Awareness Communications,” 1994. http://
net.info.nl/cosmic.html

“Cosmic Awareness Introduces Itself to the World,”
n.d. http://www.transactual.com/cac/intro.html

Melton, J. Gordon, 1996. Encyclopedia of Ameri -
can Religions. Fifth edition. Detroit, MI: Gale
Research.

Cottingley fairies

The Cottingley fairies came into being in
1917 as images on photographs produced by
two Yorkshire girls, Frances Griffiths, ten, and
her cousin Elsie Wright, thirteen. The inci¬
dent began as a childish trick to settle a score
with adult authority figures but ended as one
of the more bizarre episodes in the history of
both photography and occultism. It would
take six decades for the truth to emerge.

Frances and her mother and Elsie and her
parents shared a house in Cottingley, near
Bradford, Yorkshire, while Frances’s father
served in World War I. When Frances fell into
a brook, one day, and came home soaking
wet, she explained that the mishap had oc¬
curred while she was playing with the fairies
who lived there. She was punished anyway.
Offended at her friend’s treatment, Elsie sug¬
gested that they borrow her father’s camera,
take pictures of fairies, persuade their parents
of the fairies’ authenticity, then later an¬
nounce that they were fake. They would then
clinch their case by reminding their parents
that the adults had lied to them about Father
Christmas.

Knowing nothing of the scheme, of course,
Arthur Wright loaned his daughter his camera
and provided her with a single plate. An hour
later the girls returned from the brook and
told Wright that they had photographed a
fairy. He did not believe them, but when he
developed the picture, he saw four tiny,
winged women in front of Frances. The fig¬
ures looked like paper cutouts, but the skepti¬
cal elders could not extract an admission from
the children. A month later, a reluctant
Wright gave Elsie access to the camera once
more. The result was a second picture, this
one of a gnome whom Elsie appeared to be
inviting to jump into her lap. Annoyed at
what he took to be a continuing joke, Wright
kept the camera out of his daughter’s hands
thereafter.

That would have been that; however, in
1920, Polly Wright, Elsie’s mother, attended a
lecture on fairy lore. Afterward, she brought
up the photographs to the speaker, who im¬
mediately asked if he could see prints. These
prints soon found their way into the hands of
Theosophist Edward Gardner, a believer in
fairies. The Wrights provided him with copies
of the originals, which Gardner showed to an
acquaintance knowledgeable in photography.
The expert stated, guardedly, that he could see
no evidence of fraud. Excited, Gardner dis¬
cussed the pictures in a lecture that May, and
soon Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the revered au-

74 Cottingley fairies

Frances Griffiths with “fairies, ’’photographed at Cottingley, West Yorkshire, July 1917 (Fortean Picture Library)

thor of rhe Sherlock Holmes stories and then
an avid spiritualist, heard about the matter.
Doyle had Gardner take the pictures to the
Kodak laboratory in London, where two ex¬
perts neither endorsed nor repudiated them.
In the summer, when Gardner met the
Wrights for the first time, he provided Elsie
with a modern camera. In short order, she and
Frances had three new fairy photographs.

Doyle wrote two articles for the popular
magazine The Strand (December 1920 and
March 1921 issues), declaring the pictures as
proof of the existence of fairies. Doyle en¬
dured a great deal of ridicule for his advocacy
of what many saw as a transparent hoax, but
that did not stop him from elaborating on the
matter in a revealingly titled book, The Com -
ing of the Fairies (1922). The year before, in
1921, a self-described clairvoyant named
Geoffrey Hodson, also a Theosophist, had ac¬
companied the girls to the beck where the
fairies lived. He claimed to have observed

many of them, though the girls saw nothing
and attempts to photograph the entities came
to naught.

Two and a half decades later, Gardner
wrote a memoir of the episode. He was still
convinced of the authenticity of the Cotting¬
ley fairies. Occultists who championed the
pictures noted that the two girls, now grown
women, had never admitted to hoaxing, even
when prompted to do so. Still, their answers
tended to be more equivocal than their advo¬
cates seemed to understand; when they said,
for example, that these were photographs of
“figments of our imaginations,” the occultists
assumed they were talking about “thought
forms”—paranormal projections from the
mind to photographic film. But in a 1975 in¬
terview for Woman magazine, the two old
women appeared to respond more positively
to the inevitable questions. The following
year, when asked by Yorkshire Television if
the photos were fakes, Frances’s response was

Curry 75

simple—“Of course not”—spoken as if the
question were a foolish and impertinent one.

That, however, was the last time the
women would maintain the pretense. In

1982, The Unexplained, a British magazine,
revealed that the two had confessed. In early

1983, they provided a signed statement to
British Journal of Photography editor Geoffrey
Crawley, who then wrote a long, definitive ac¬
count of the curious episode. The women did
not tell Crawley quite everything; they said
they wanted to keep some of the details to
themselves for a book they intended to write.
Neither lived long enough, however, to pro¬
duce the proposed volume. In a final, curious
footnote, Frances insisted to her death that
though the pictures did not show real fairies,
she had seen real fairies in the beck when she
and Elsie were friends and playmates.

A well-reviewed 1997 film, Fairy Tale: A
True Story dramatized the story, with Peter
O’Toole playing Doyle.

See Also: Fairies encountered

Further Reading

Clapham, Walter, 1975. “There Were Fairies at the
Bottom of the Garden.” Woman (October):

42-43, 45.

Cooper, Joe, 1982. “Cottingley: At Last the Truth.”
The Unexplained 117: 2238-2340.

Crawley, Geoffrey, 1982, 1983. “That Astonishing
Affair of the Cottingley Fairies.” British Journal of
Photography Pt. I (December 14): 1375-1380;
Pt. II (December 31): 1406—1411, 1413—1414;
Pt. Ill (January 7): 9-15; Pt. IV (January 21):
66-71; Pt. V (January 28): 91-96; Pt. VI (Febru¬
ary 4): 117-121; Pt. VII (February 11):

142-145, 153, 159; Pt. VIII (February 18):
170-171; Pt. IX (April 1): 332-338; Pt. X (April
8): 362-366.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 1922. The Coming of the
Fairies. New York: George H. Doran Company.

Gardner, Edward L., 1945. Fairies: The Cottingley
Photographs and Their Sequel. London: Theo-
sophical Publishing blouse.

Hitchens, Christopher, 1997. “Fairy Tales Can
Come True. . . .” Vanity Fair 446 (October): 204,
206, 208,210.

Hodson, Geoffrey, 1925. Fairies at Work and at Play.
London: Theosophical Publishing House.

Sanderson, S. F., 1973. “The Cottingley Fairy Pho¬
tographs: A Re-Appraisal of the Evidence.” Folk -
lore 84 (Summer): 89-103.

Smith, Paul, 1991. “The Cottingley Fairies: The End
of a Legend.” In Peter Narvaez, ed. The Good Peo -
pie: New Fairylore Essays, 371-405. Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky.

The Council

William LePar of North Canton, Ohio, chan¬
nels the Council, a single voice speaking for
twelve souls communicating from the Celes¬
tial Level of the God-Made Heavenly Realms.
This, the Council says, is the only time in all
of history that human beings have been con¬
tacted in this way. Since the original, involun¬
tary contact in the early 1970s, the Council
has generated hundreds of thousands of words
of discourse.

LePar heads the SOL Association for Re¬
search, a nonprofit, tax-exempt organiza¬
tion. It publishes a newsletter, tapes, videos,
and books and sponsors lectures and a lend¬
ing library.

Further Reading

“Biographical Sketch of William Allen LePar,” n.d.
http://www.solarpress.com/about/BIO-BILL.
HTM

Curry

In a published letter to author and UFO ab-
ductee Whitley Strieber, an anonymous man
recounts an otherworldly encounter he experi¬
enced at the age of eight, while living on an
Indian reservation in South Dakota. The cor¬
respondent said he found himself inexplicably
outside the house in the middle of the night,
where he saw a smiling man who was some¬
how “different,” with larger than normal eyes
and a small amount of hair on his head. In¬
stinctively, the boy knew the stranger’s name
was Curry, though later in life he learned that
curry is “actually a sort of spice from India.”

The stranger led the boy to an odd-looking
black car. Inside it was a man who looked to
be twenty years old or so. The man resembled
Curry, and somehow the boy understood that
he was to comfort him because the man was
frightened. The “car” ascended and flew rap¬
idly to a remote location where there was a

76 Cyclopeans

crossroads. A “ship or shuttle” then took the
boy and his charge apparently into space, but
Strieber’s correspondent had no memory of
anything except being dropped off and seeing
Curry again. Now Curry was wearing a hood
that covered everything but his eyes.

This was only the first of a number of para¬
normal encounters the correspondent would
have over the years, though this one, appar¬
ently, was his last with Curry. He refers to
them as “dreams, or experiences, depending
on how you want to look at it.”

See Also: Abductions by UFOs; Strieber, Whitley

Further Reading

Strieber, Whitley, and Anne Strieber, eds., 1997. The
Communion Letters. New York: HarperPrism.

Cyclopeans

Argentine ufologist Fabio Picasso coined the
term “Cyclopeans” to characterize one-eyed
aliens whose alleged presence is the subject of
a handful of South American press accounts.
Picasso acknowledges that some accounts are
certain or likely hoaxes, and others have not
been well investigated. Nonetheless, as of
1992, he had found eleven such reports.

One such case is said to have occurred on
August 28, 1963, at Sagrada Familia, Brazil.
Three boys witnessed the sudden appearance
of a beam of light in their backyard. Inside
the light, a transparent, ball-shaped object
hovered. Inside it, four one-eyed entities,
three males and one female, clad in tight cov¬
eralls, were visible. One stepped out of the
UFO and floated in the air, communicating
first by gestures, then by telepathy, to the
children (the content of the message is not
specified). The being returned to the craft,
which then departed.

At Torrent, Argentina, in February 1965,
farm laborers, returning home late at night
from hunting, noticed five small figures.
When one of the hunters acted in a threaten¬
ing matter, the shapes suddenly grew larger
until they were around eight feet tall. The be¬
ings chased the hunters to a house. Later, one
man escaped from the house with the one¬

eyed entities in hot pursuit. One managed to
grab him with its hairy hands, but the man
broke loose and got away. Subsequently, the
others effected an escape by van.

“Cyclopean beings can be classified into two
subtypes,” Picasso writes. “There are short Cy¬
clopeans .. . and tall ones. . . . The latter beings
often behave aggressively” (Picasso, 1992).

Further Reading

Picasso, Fabio, 1992. “Infrequent Types of South
American Humanoids.” Strange Magazine 9
(Spring/Summer): 34-35, 55.

Cymatrili

Enid Brady was a spiritualist medium who led
a small church in Holly Hill, Florida. In the
early 1950s, she began to experience tele¬
pathic communications from the “master
teachers of Venus.” One of them was Cyma¬
trili. He and his companions were based in a
giant ship in orbit above the southeastern
United States. Venusians look much like hu¬
mans but are finer featured. Their civilization
is advanced, peaceful, and free of disease,
poverty, and conflict. Venusians live to be sev¬
eral hundred years old.

Brady was little noted outside contactee
circles until the summer of 1957, when a re¬
tired army major, Wayne S. Aho, took tape
recordings to Washington, DC, of Brady’s
communications from Cymatrili, Huma
Matra, Mandall, and John (the latter two
“ventla”—saucer—pilots). Aho visited the
Pentagon. He persuaded Defense Depart¬
ment personnel to listen to an hour and a
half’s worth of the tapes. A spokesman pro¬
nounced the messages “unimpressive and un¬
convincing” (“Pentagon,” 1957). Aho later
played the tape for a United Press Interna¬
tional reporter, who wrote a tongue-in-cheek
piece on the experience.

In other channelings, Brady’s Venusians re¬
lated that in 1955, Martians had landed at
Edwards Air Force Base in southern Califor¬
nia and were taken into custody. Engineers
from the air force learned a great deal about
extraterrestrial technology from studying the

Cymatrili 77

saucer the Martians had arrived in, and that
technology was incorporated into later, flying¬
wing, experimental aircraft.

Bradys space informants also told her that
landings would begin in November 1957, and
that in 1962, Earth would enter a New Age
under the guidance of friendly extraterrestrials.

Further Reading

Bryant, Larry W., 1983. “Enid Brady’s E-T Contact
Legacy.” MUFON UFO Journal 179 (January):
12-13.

“Pentagon Hears ‘Voices from Venus’ but Fails to Be
Excited about Them,” 1957. The Saucers Report
2, 3 (October/November): 8-9.

David of Landa

David of the planet Landa, a distant world
not recognized by conventional astronomy,
channeled through Keith Macdonald (d.
1999), a Grayslake, Illinois, car mechanic who
lived a quiet life outside the public spotlight.
Macdonald is typical of the sorts of persons
ufologist/occultist John A. Keel has called
“silent contactees.” Unlike the flamboyant fig¬
ures who seek attention and audiences, Mac¬
donald confided his experiences only with
family and trusted friends.

Macdonald became aware of David while
undergoing hypnotic regression directed by
his close friend Ron Owen. In 1974, Mac¬
donald, his wife, and two sons saw what they
believed to be a UFO hovering over a field
across the street from their townhouse. Four
years later, reliving the experience through
hypnosis, he “recalled” being taken into the
object and undergoing a terrifying abduction
at the hands of gray-skinned humanoids.
Macdonald pursued recalling the experience
through further hypnosis sessions until one
session suddenly ended with his declaring
that they could go no further because
“they’re here—right in the room with us!”
(Clark, 1986). Then an entity who identified
himself as “David” began speaking through
Macdonald.

From then on David appeared in regular
channelings. During these channelings, Mac¬
donald would lapse into a trance state and
speak in David’s voice. Afterward he could
not recall any of the content and would de¬
pend on Owen to explain what words had
passed through his mouth. When David
wished to communicate only with Macdon¬
ald, however, no trance was necessary. A
“voice” inside his head would speak, and
sometimes Macdonald would psychically per¬
ceive David and other people of Landa. Mac¬
donald described the men as strikingly hand¬
some, the women beautiful. All wore robes
and reminded Macdonald of Greek gods and
goddesses. Sometimes David came through
spontaneously when Macdonald was speaking
with Owen over the phone. At first, the chan¬
nelings—a word Macdonald and Owen had
not heard until they attended a Wyoming
contactee conference sponsored by psycholo¬
gist/contactee R. Leo Sprinkle—were rela¬
tively infrequent. With the passing of time,
they occurred more often, on occasion, as
many as three or four times a week.

Other extraterrestrials soon were speaking
through Macdonald. There was Corinthian,
David’s wife. Others were Pauline, Lenoir,
Chieftain, and Isaiah. Some would not give
their names, insisting names were unimpor-

80 David of Landa

tant. David, however, did most of the com¬
municating. Whenever a particular question
was asked, he would excuse himself and say he
had to clear the answer with higher authority
After a pause, from a few seconds to a few
minutes, he would return either to answer the
question or to announce he was not permitted
to answer it. Other times, though rarely, the
entity with whom David had conferred, the
Master, would speak, always briefly. The Mas¬
ter’s voice had an odd, eerie quality and a tone
of absolute authority.

Over many dozens of hours of channeling,
this story emerged:

Just before Moses was given the Ten Com¬
mandments, seven citizens of Landa were
elected by the Masters for a mission on Earth.
The leader of the Seven Select, also called the
Habanas or the Warriors of God, was Daniel
(pronounced Dan -yell), the son of David and
Corinthian. Once on Earth, the Habanas’s
souls occupied human bodies. With the pass¬
ing of centuries, during which the Habanas
reincarnated repeatedly, other Habanas ar¬
rived, filling Earth with extraterrestrial agents
who with each life gained new knowledge that
would be useful when the day of reckoning—
the cleansing of the human race and the final
showdown with the evil forces of the uni¬
verse—came. This climax would occur within
the lifetimes of most living people. In this life,
Daniel was Keith Macdonald.

David said, “Keith has now graduated and
become a prophet. He is a prophet of Christ.
He is a prophet of God.” The people of
Landa, devout Christians, practice a form of
Roman Catholicism. Raised a Protestant,
Macdonald knew little of Catholicism until
the Landanians contacted him.

According to a channeling from the Master
in 1985, “soon there will be forty craft of
Landa truly visible to the eyes of all humans.
Three more craft shall come down to receive
Keith. This will be done to gain the attention
of the many, for Keith has a job. His first job
will be to be received by us of Landa, to be
taken there for forty days and nights. During
that time forty craft of Landa will travel to

every nation to show Keith has been received.
When the meeting is over, Keith will return to
meet with the leaders of the churches and the
nations. He will demand the release of the
Scrolls for all human beings to see and under¬
stand.” The Master explained that earthlings
cannot now tell the difference between good
and evil because the Scrolls—suppressed an¬
cient religious documents—have not been
available to them.

The Scrolls contain the hidden history of
humanity, revealing all the truths that God,
Jesus, and Mary wanted humans to know but
were concealed because they did not suit the
purposes of earthly political leaders and
church authorities. Keith himself, the Master
asserted, had this knowledge within himself,
though it had not yet been released into his
conscious mind.

At the time of the Lifting—which is what
the Landanians called the occasion that Mac¬
donald would be taken aboard a spacecraft
(one of three that would appear in the same
empty field where evil aliens had kidnapped
him in 1974) and flown home to Landa—
there would be thousands of witnesses. On
September 22, 1985, Macdonald encountered
the apparitional forms of David and
Corinthian, who informed him that an earth¬
quake would devastate San Francisco soon.
Upset, he pleaded for the innocent lives that
would be lost, but his space friends/parents
soberly replied, “It is inevitable. You must
pray for the souls of those who will be lost and
for those who will miss them.”

Convinced that the earthquake would
occur any day, Macdonald waited gloomily
and anxiously. Nothing happened. But then
on the morning of October 7, as Macdonald
was letting the dog out, a blinding light shot
out of the sky and struck him in the face. He
took this to mean that the first of the three
Landanian craft that would carry him away
was in place.

The following day, while talking with
Owen on the phone, David took over. He said
that a physical, in-the-flesh meeting between
Keith and David would occur in two days in

Dead extraterrestrials 81

Keith’s house. David and Corinthian did not
keep their appointment.

In the days and weeks that followed, Mac¬
donald experienced a series of unusually vivid
dreams. One night he dreamed that he had
been accepted back into the military. To him
this symbolized his role as a Warrior of God
about to “fight.” Another night he dreamed
that he was on a college campus, knowing
where every building, every door, every room
was. He heard professors lecturing and knew
every word they were saying. He understood
that he had “graduated” to a level more ad¬
vanced than college. In yet another dream, he
was gazing over a crowd of hundreds of peo¬
ple, seeing deep inside each and recognizing
each one as a fellow Warrior of God, brother
and sister Habanas who would be coming
together in the great events yet to occur as
Earth met its cosmic destiny. A voice inside
the dream told him that this was a “reunion.”
A blinding light cut through the dream, and
when Macdonald sat bolt upright in bed, it
continued to shine. It was so bright that he
had to put his arm over his face.

Strange, ominous events seemed to point
to the imminent Lifting. Twice on the evening
of October 23, as Macdonald and Owen were
talking, the phone suddenly disconnected,
each time with a peculiar squealing sound. It
happened just as they were discussing key
points about Landanian objectives. Macdon¬
ald saw odd lights both inside the house and
in the sky. Landanians appeared with increas¬
ing frequency, but only Macdonald could see
them. They were invisible to his wife. Mac¬
donald tried to capture them on film, but all
that the resulting photographs showed was
the interior of the house, nothing more.

Early in December, the date of the San
Francisco earthquake that was to prefigure the
Lifting appeared before his eyes in brilliant
light: DECEMBER 22. He could not only see
the date but also experience the sensations of
being in the quake. As the days passed, the vi¬
sion of the date recurred along with scenes of
devastation. When December 22 came and
went with no earthquake, David told Keith

that the real date was January 3; the twenty-
second was the date on which the craft would
begin to show themselves. David said that
Macdonald should always remember, “There
is more than one meaning to a sentence.”

The failure of assorted prophecies never
entirely diminished Keith Macdonald’s be¬
lief—a palpably sincere one—that people
from Landa were communicating with him.
He learned, however, to be cautious about
their predictions, including promises of in-
the-flesh meetings prior to the Lifting. In the
years that followed, growing health problems
forced Macdonald into retirement. In his last
years, he spent considerable time in the hospi¬
tal. During that period contacts occurred
more often in unusually lucid dreams than
they did via channeling.

See Also: Abductions by UFOs; Channeling; Con-
tactees; Keel, John Alva; Sprinkle, Ronald Leo

Further Reading

Clark, Jerome, 1986. “Waiting for the Space Broth¬
ers.” Fate Pt. I. 39, 3 (March): 47-54; Pt. II. 39,
4 (April): 81-87; Pt. III. 39, 5 (May): 68-76.

Owen, Ron, 2000. Private communication to
Jerome Clark (January 6).

Dead extraterrestrials

Claims that the bodies of extraterrestrials have
been found in the wreckage of spacecraft are
older than the post-World War II UFO age.
As long ago as 1864, a French newspaper (La
Pays, June 17) reported the discovery, by two
American geologists, of a hollow, egg-shaped
rock. Inside it were various odd artifacts. They
also found the mummified remains of a tiny
humanoid—about three feet tall—with a bald
head and an elephantlike trunk growing out
of its forehead. On October 13, 1877, a
provincial paper in Argentina set the identical
tall tale in that country, adding the detail that
the discoverers had taken the body and arti¬
facts to a local saloon to put on display.

In 1897, during a wave of UFO (or, in the
terminology of the time, “airship”) sightings,
ships crashed and Martians died in Illinois
and Texas. In the latter instance, the pilot was
reportedly buried in a cemetery in a small

82 Dead extraterrestrials

north Texas town. When the latter tale was re¬
vived in the late 1960s and early 1970s, hope¬
ful investigators rushed to the scene, only to
learn eventually that no such corpse or grave
had ever existed outside the imagination of a
turn-of-the-century prankster.

Though it did not come to wider attention
until many years later, a killing of a tiny hu¬
manoid reportedly took place in 1913 near
Farmersville, Texas. Three young brothers
were chopping cotton on their farm when
they heard the family dogs barking and then
howling. On investigating, the boys saw the
dogs attacking a strange little man “no more
than eighteen inches high and kind of a dark
green color,” one witness, an old man, recalled
in a 1978 interview. “His arms were hanging
down just beside him, like they was growed
down the side of him. He had on a kind of
hat that reminded me of a Mexican hat. . . .
Everything looked like a rubber suit including
the hat.” The dogs tore him to pieces, leaving
human-looking organs and blood on the
ground. The peculiar tale was known within
the family for decades. Though he had a hard
time believing the story, the investigator
thought there was no question of the old
man’s sincerity.

Rumors of dead aliens, however, did not
enter popular culture in any significant way
until 1947, after Kenneth Arnolds June 24
observation of nine discs over Mount Rainier,
Washington, brought “flying saucers” into
common currency. After initial theories that
tied the sightings to secret aviation experi¬
ments proved groundless, those who contin¬
ued to take the reports seriously slowly began
to wonder if visitors from other planets were
responsible for the phenomenon. By 1949,
rumors of recovered extraterrestrial bodies
began to see print, notably in the entertain¬
ment industry newspaper Variety. Columnist
Frank Scully wrote that on three occasions the
previous year, beginning with an incident in
Aztec, New Mexico, in March, U.S. Air Force
personnel had recovered, at various desert
sites, the remains of crashed spacecraft and
bodies. He expanded these allegations into a

book destined for lasting notoriety, Behind the
Flying Saucers (1950). In it, he identified his
source as the pseudonymous “Dr. Gee,” said
to be a leading scientific expert on magnetism
(brought into the investigation of the recovery
because it was believed that the ships “proba¬
bly flew on magnetic lines of force”). The
dead crews, human in every respect except for
their perfect teeth and unfashionable 1890s-
style clothes, were surmised to be of Venusian
origin. A subsequent expose in True magazine
revealed that “Dr. Gee” was veteran confi¬
dence artist Leo GeBauer. With his longtime
partner-in-crime, Silas Newton, GeBauer had
concocted the tale to sell bogus oil-detection
devices allegedly tied to advanced interplane¬
tary technology.

As a result of the episode, even persons oth¬
erwise sympathetically disposed to the idea of
space visitation were deeply skeptical of
crash/retrieval claims. Still, the claims circu¬
lated in a significant body of saucer folklore,
only a little of which surfaced in the UFO lit¬
erature. In 1952, Jim and Coral Lorenzen of
the newly formed Aerial Phenomena Research
Organization (APRO)—which would prove
among the most influential and durable of all
UFO groups—spoke with an airman who
swore that four years earlier he and others
from a military-scientific team had been dis¬
patched to a New Mexico crash site. There he
had seen a disc and learned that dead, little
men had been taken from its cabin. Not long
afterward, a “young meteorologist” told the
Lorenzens that in 1948, while visiting Wright
Air Development Center (soon to be renamed
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base) in Dayton,
Ohio, he had spoken with an old friend, an
air force man. The friend, in Coral Lorenzens
words, showed him “space suits ranging from
three to about five and a half feet in height
and diagrams of a circular ship that bore a
strong resemblance to a ‘flying saucer.’ He said
that people who laughed about flying saucers
were going to get a big jolt some day—these
suits had been taken off the bodies of men
who had apparently perished in the crash of
their saucer-shaped ships” (Lorenzen, 1962).

Dead extraterrestrials 83

On May 7, 1955, a Caracas, Venezuela,
newspaper, El Universal, carried a sensational
story of an incident supposed to have taken
place almost exactly five years earlier. A man
claimed that while driving down a rural high¬
way in Argentina, he spotted a flying saucer
that had landed on the side of the road. Curi¬
ous, he stopped his car, approached the craft,
and eventually boarded it. Inside, he found
the bodies of three little men lying near an in¬
strument panel. After touching one, he pan¬
icked and fled, to return the next day to see
UFOs hovering over the site. Where the origi¬
nal craft had been there was only a pile of
warm, gray ashes. Years later, a retrospective
investigation by Argentine ufologists deter¬
mined that the “witness” had made up the
story.

More intriguing was an account given in
confidence to Isabel L. Davis, one of the most
intelligent, hard-headed, first-generation ufol¬
ogists and a fierce critic of the more out¬
landish saucer tales. Davis never published the
account in her lifetime, but she found it in¬
triguing, given that the informant, a medical
scientist, seemed serious and credible. Even
so, the scientist s claim was a fantastic one. In
the late 1950s, she told Davis, she was di¬
rected to a secure, government-run facility
and ordered to examine body parts that she
quickly recognized as humanlike but not
human. Her superiors provided no explana¬
tions or further details, and when her work
was completed, they instructed her to tell no¬
body. As she remarked to Davis, she would
not have done so anyway, since no one would
have believed her.

Another tale—this one circulated by saucer
personality and publisher Gray Barker—con¬
cerned Nicholas von Poppen, an Estonian
refugee who had fled his native country when
Soviet troops overran it and slaughtered his
family. That much of the story seems true (the
real Von Poppen died in Los Angeles in
1976). Beyond that, however, Barker and
truth parted company. He took an unpub¬
lished science-fiction manuscript written by a
subscriber to his magazine The Saucerian and

transformed it into a “true” story. In the origi¬
nal, the writer/subscriber had taken a colorful,
real acquaintance, Von Poppen, and placed
him inside a fantasy in which Von Poppen
took photographs in New Mexico of a crashed
UFO and its occupants. Barker took this story
and embellished it further, then marketed it as
an account of an authentic incident—not the
only hoax Barker would perpetrate on his im¬
pressionable readers.

In the 1970s, ufologist Leonard H. String-
field, in the face of criticism and skepticism
from some colleagues, began collecting
crash/retrieval claims and rumors and pub¬
lishing them in a series of monographs. None
amounted to much as evidence, though some
were undeniably interesting, such as the testi¬
mony of a Presbyterian pastor. This man—
Stringfield protected the names of his inform¬
ants—alleged that when he was a boy, he and
his father (also a clergyman) visited the Mu¬
seum of Science and Industry in Chicago.
During one visit, they got lost. In their search
for an exit, they accidentally entered a room
where a number of humanoid beings lay pre¬
served under a glass-covered case. Before they
could fully grasp what they were seeing, they
were discovered. The father was pressured to
sign papers swearing him to silence.

In another alleged instance, said to have
taken place at a New Jersey air force base in
January 1978, a sergeant—who insisted on
anonymity—told Stringfield that in the early
morning hours a military policeman had shot
and killed a humanoid being that he had en¬
countered while chasing a UFO in his car.
The body was then shipped off to Wright-Pat-
terson Air Force Base. The sergeant eventually
provided an official-looking “incident report,”
with the names of witnesses and investigators
inked out. Stringfield’s informant talked and
acted in a manner that he and fellow ufologist
Richard Hall, who interviewed the man in
person on two occasions, deemed sincere, but,
despite a serious effort, they uncovered noth¬
ing that conclusively verified the claim.

Perhaps the most interesting of Stringfield’s
informants were several “medical people” who

84 Dead extraterrestrials

had performed autopsies on alien corpses.
One, a physician who “served on the staff of a
major hospital” (Stringfield, 1980), provided
a detailed account of an autopsy, in the early
1950s, of a humanoid reminiscent of the
gray-skinned, big-eyed entities that would fig¬
ure in abduction lore in later years. String-
field, who died in December 1994, never re¬
vealed the names of these individuals, so
independent investigation of their stories and
status proved impossible. Nor would his fam¬
ily provide investigators with Stringjield’s files.
None disputed Stringfield’s integrity, though
some questioned his judgment in taking such
extraordinary testimony at face value.

Lecturing in London on April 14, 1979,
American occultist and channeler James Hur-
tak declared that a flying saucer had crashed
as early as 1946. His source, he said, was a
colleague who had participated in the re¬

trieval. The crash occurred near Great Falls,
Montana. “The bodies were shipped to the
Edwards Air Force Base facility in Califor¬
nia,” Hurtak claimed. “It was determined
that the green hue on the bodies was due to
the nature of the chemistry of the fuel sys¬
tem. After extensive studies the bodies were
put on ice and sealed in aluminum canisters”
(Hurtak, 1979).

In the late 1970s, a Minnesota school¬
teacher, William L. Moore, and a nuclear sci¬
entist and UFO lecturer, Stanton T. Fried¬
man, got interested in an incident that to
most was an obscure footnote: a brief flurry of
excitement in early July 1947 over the sup¬
posed recovery of a “flying disc” near Roswell,
New Mexico. The story had hit the presses
only to be contradicted in a matter of a few
hours, when the U.S. Army Air Force an¬
nounced that it had all risen out of an absurd

Display showing a dead alien autopsy (with models) at the UFO Museum in Roswell, New Mexico (Peregrine
Mendoza/Fortean Picture Library)

Dead extraterrestrials 85

misunderstanding about a downed weather
balloon. During his travels, Friedman met a
retired air force officer who, at the time, had
been stationed at Roswell Army Air Field; the
officer, Major Jesse A. Marcel, had been the
first uniformed officer on the site, and his ob¬
servation and experience over the next few
days put into question the long-accepted bal¬
loon explanation. Friedman also interviewed a
woman who had worked at an Albuquerque
radio station. She vividly remembered how
the U.S. Air Force had squelched coverage of
the story. Both she and Marcel believed that
some kind of extraordinary event that had
badly rattled the military had happened.

Moore’s The Roswell Incident (1980),
written with Bermuda Triangle popularizer
Charles Berlitz, would be only the first of
many books to address the subject. As inves¬
tigators spoke with a growing number of in¬
formants, military and civilian, they estab¬
lished that a cover-up, maintained in part by
the threatening of witnesses, had been put
into place and that the official story was not
the real story. Some witnesses even asserted
that the military had recovered bodies of lit¬
tle men at either the original crash site or
another, related one some miles away. In
time, the Roswell incident, as everyone
called it, was no longer an arcane fascination
of ufologists but a much-discussed item of
pop culture, influencing any number of tele¬
vision shows, documentaries, movies, jokes,
and more.

After years of denying that the air force had
covered up the Roswell incident, the General
Accounting Office, at the behest of New Mex¬
ico Congressman Steven Schiff, searched offi¬
cial archives for relevant documents, uncover¬
ing little of interest. Around the same time, in
1994, the U.S. Air Force declared that there
had indeed been a cover-up; it had been of
Project Mogul, a highly classified project in
which balloons were sent aloft to monitor
possible Soviet atomic tests over the horizon.
A Mogul balloon had come down near
Roswell, and the military’s effort to keep it a
secret sparked the legend of a UFO crash. In

the face of press and popular skepticism
(much of it focused on the explanation’s fail¬
ure to account for reports of bodies) the U.S.
Air Force renewed its inquiries. On June 24,
1997, it contended that the supposedly alien
bodies were in fact “anthropomorphic test
dummies that were carried aloft by U.S. Air
Force high altitude balloons for scientific re¬
search” (The Roswell Report, 1997). The prob¬
lem with this theory was that tests involving
such dummies did not occur until 1953, leav¬
ing the air force with the rationalization—un¬
persuasive to many—that the informants sim¬
ply had their time mixed up.

Still, many ufologists, as much out of frus¬
tration as firm intellectual conviction, ac¬
cepted the Mogul explanation, whatever its
imperfections. The Roswell incident had
spawned an industry and generated a huge
body of often confusing, contradictory (and
sometimes demonstrably false) testimony. It
even generated documents (most notably the
notorious and deeply suspect “MJ-12” pa¬
pers, purportedly from the supersecret proj¬
ect overseeing the UFO cover-up). On the
whole, it did not accomplish a great deal ex¬
cept to line the pockets of opportunists who
didn’t much care about the truth—which, in
any event, seemed irrecoverable so many
years past the original event. Roswell also in¬
spired one of the most brazen hoaxes in UFO
history, the so-called alien autopsy film that
aired on the Fox Network in the mid-1990s,
purporting to show the dismemberment of
an extraterrestrial body by government scien¬
tists in 1947.

The failure of the Roswell story to come to
firm resolution after two decades of furious
controversy sobered many once-enthusiastic
or hopeful ufologists. But as long as questions
remain, the mystery will stay open to those
who are sufficiently determined to keep
thinking—or, perhaps, thinking wishfully—
about it. And Roswell or no, rumors, tall tales,
and—on rare occasion—genuinely intriguing
reports of dead extraterrestrials in our midst
are likely to entertain live humans for some
time to come.

86 Dead extraterrestrials

A photo from the U.S. Air Force’s Roswell Report about the 1947 UFO incident at Roswell, New Mexico, released June
24, 1997, and intended to eliminate long-standing rumors. Air force personnel supposedly used stretchers and gurneys to
pick up these 200-pound dummies in the field and move them to the laboratory. (Associated Press!Air Force)

See Also: Abductions by UFOs; Aurora Martian; Cahn, J. P., 1952. “The Flying Saucers and the Mys-

Fossilized aliens; Oleson’s giants terious Little Men.” True (September): 17-19,

Further Reading

Steiger, Brad, 1966. Strangers from the Skies. New
York: Award Books.

Diane

According to contactee Dana Howard, Diane
was a Venusian who began appearing to hu¬
mans in 1939. She returned in 1955 and was
seen many times after that. “Diane came in
the same miraculous manner as the Lady of
The Lourdes and Our Lady of Fatima,”
Howard wrote. “To all appearances She is a
physical being like ourselves, yet She is obvi¬
ously created of substances not of this earth ”
(Howard, 1958).

Howard, who claimed to have visited
Venus, reported that on October 3, 1957, as
she was lecturing at the Women’s Clubhouse
in Fontana, California, she felt a strange
warmth come over her. After the meeting, sev¬
eral audience members rushed up to her to say
that they had seen an apparition of a young

88 Divine Fire

woman transposed over Howard’s body. One
audience member, Eleanor Warner, described
“the figure of a beautiful woman, very young,
with long golden hair, a very slim body, and
small waistline. She seemed to glow in the
golden light.” Another witness, Trudy Allen,
was “overcome by the transcendent beauty
that was shining forth.”

In Howard’s account, Diane appeared to
her, in full view of twenty-seven witnesses, for
the first time on April 29, 1955, and identi¬
fied herself as a Venusian. That same week
UFOs appeared on four occasions over Palm
Springs, California, Howard’s hometown.

See Also: Contactees

Further Reading

Howard, Dana, 1958. “The Drama behind the
Space Ships.” Flying Saucer Review 4, 3
(May/June): 21-23.

Divine Fire

In a book that would prove influential in
1970s New Age circles, Brad Steiger wrote of
what he called the “Divine Fire.” He believed
that a dramatic rise was occurring in visionary
experience, channeling, and other contact with
ostensible higher intelligences. “Clergymen,
clerks, professors, public relations executives,
housewives, students, servicemen, and factory
workers have been demonstrating that Pente¬
cost was not just a one-shot special designed to
excite the Aposdes and their kibitzers in Jeru¬
salem of A.D. 30,” he said (Steiger, 1973).

According to Steiger, these extraordinary
experiences and communications were taking
a variety of forms, but the message was the
same in its essence as those given to prophets
five thousand years ago. He suggested that
“the very repetition of a basic message may be
evidence of the vital relevancy and universality
of a cosmic truth.” The messages came from
ostensible angels, extraterrestrials, divinities,
and the like, but all spoke of a “Higher Being”
from whom each individual could draw inspi¬
ration and wisdom. These messages stated
that all humans have the power within them¬
selves to contact this Higher Being. All things

were one; everything and everybody was at
once individual and universal. And finally, hu¬
mans were entering, in Steiger’s summary, “a
New Age, another progression in our evolu¬
tion as spiritual beings. . . . We are moving to¬
ward a state of mystical consciousness wherein
every man shall be priest.”

See Also: Channeling

Further Reading

Steiger, Brad, 1973. Revelation: The Divine Fire. En¬
glewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Dual reference

“Dual reference” is a term coined by Massa¬
chusetts ufologist Joseph Nyman. His hyp¬
notic investigations of abductees have led him
to the discovery that many believe themselves
to be of alien origin. They have no conscious
memories of such a personal extraterrestrial
link, but under hypnosis they gradually come
to understand that the aliens who are abduct¬
ing them are actually their own associates and
colleagues. They eventually grasp that before
their human selves were bom, their alien
selves made the decision to send their con¬
sciousnesses into human fetal bodies. In the
very first years of their human lives, memories
of their homes on other worlds are lost, but
over the years, as they undergo abduction ex¬
periences, they learn—through hypnotic “re¬
call” of these experiences—of their true past
and their mission in this life and on this
planet. Sometimes, while the session is going
on, the hypnotist is able to speak directly with
the alien intelligence in the subject’s body.

Similar notions are not uncommon among
contactees, many of whom are convinced that
they were extraterrestrials in an earlier lives
and are now here to help prepare humans for
the great geophysical and spiritual changes
that will be coming soon. Dual reference also
is somewhat comparable to the notion of
Walk-ins, popularized by occult writer Ruth
Montgomery, except that Walk-ins are not al¬
ways (though they are sometimes) extraterres¬
trials. Moreover, they are so intellectually and
spiritually advanced that they only take up oc-

Dual reference 89

cupancy of the bodies of grown adults, so as
not to waste valuable time.

Nyman writes, “We strongly suspect that
the feeling of dual reference ... is uncon¬
sciously present in all [abduction] experi¬
ences” (Nyman, 1989). Most investigators of
the abduction phenomenon disagree, and in¬
deed when Nyman presented his ideas at a
1992 conference held at the Massachusetts In¬
stitute of Technology, some questioners ac¬
cused him of leading his subjects into confab¬
ulation. They were particularly critical of his
practice of asking the subjects to recall “mem¬
ories” of their lives in the womb. Among
Nymans defenders was Harvard University
psychologist John E. Mack, who was also en¬
gaged in extensive hypnotic probing of osten¬
sible abductees.

In a book published two years later, Mack
told the story of a young man he identifies
only as Paul, “one of an increasing group of
abductees . . . who have discovered that they
have a dual identity of an alien (they do not
use that word) and a human being.” Paul
was convinced that he was on Earth to show
people how to love and accept love—this
even before he found his alien identity
under hypnosis.

Paul had gone to another psychologist to
examine some of his life’s problems, including
a conviction that he had seen a weird hu¬
manoid creature. Hypnotized, he spoke of
other encounters with other strange beings,
including one when he was two or three years
old. The psychologist did not know what to
make of these stories, and he and Paul parted
company; Paul eventually found his way to
Mack.

With Mack, Paul explored an apparent
memory of a further encounter, this one when
he was six and a half. He spoke of seeing a
being inside his house and of sensing that the
two of them were “linked in a way.” They
went outside together, where they met two
groups—four or five each—of humanoids.
Though they did not look human, Paul felt
comfortable, even joyful, to be in their com¬
pany. They apparently felt the same; they

hugged him and gave every indication of feel¬
ing great affection for him. The whole experi¬
ence felt “like home.” Subsequently he was
taken aboard a ship, an experience he sensed
he had undergone in other lives. One of the
beings told him that he was from their planet.
The alien spoke of human beings’ inability to
“truly open up to another” and of their hostil¬
ity to the visiting extraterrestrials.

During the session Paul alternated between
his human and alien selves. In the latter, he
spoke of the nature of higher consciousness
and of humans’ destructive ways. He also ex¬
pressed homesickness for the ship and the
planet from which he had come. He “remem¬
bered” earlier visits to Earth, including inter¬
actions—apparently tens of millions of years
ago—with intelligent, gentle dinosaurs. In an¬
other instance, the ship on which he was trav¬
eling—in earthling guise—with extraterres¬
trial companions rescued the surviving
occupants of a crashed craft that went down
in the desert after being shot down by “men in
uniforms.” Two of the crew died and had to
be abandoned in the face of advancing sol¬
diers. Paul felt, in this instance, ashamed to be
human; yet, in a broader context, he felt cer¬
tain that “peace and love” were slowly spread¬
ing over the Earth and that he had a role to
play in opening up human beings to larger,
benevolent cosmic truths.

According to Mack, Paul has learned pow¬
erful psychic healing powers from his ongoing
interactions with his extraterrestrial friends.
He has been given a great deal of information
on their “unbelievable” technology but has
been forbidden to share it (Mack, 1994a).

Mack rejects the theory that such attach¬
ments of abductee to abductor are analogous
to the so-called Stockholm Syndrome, in
which a hostage comes to identify with his or
her captor. There is, he says, “little sense that
the alien identity is primarily a product of
‘identification with the aggressor.’ . . . Rather,
the dual identity appears to be a fundamental
dimension of the consciousness expansion or
opening that is an intrinsic aspect of the ab¬
duction phenomenon itself” (Mack, 1994b).

90 Dugja

See Also: Abductions by UFOs; Contactees; Walk-ins

Further Reading

Mack, John E., 1994a. Abduction: Human Encoun -
ters with Aliens. New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons.

-, 1994b. “Post Conference Note.” In Andrea

Pritchard, David E. Pritchard, John E. Mack,
Pam Kasey, and Claudia Yapp, eds. Alien Discus -
sions: Proceedings of the Abduction Study Confer -
ence, 146. Cambridge, MA: North Cambridge
Press.

Nyman, Joseph, 1988. “The Latent Encounter Expe¬
rience— A Composite Model.” MUFON UFO
Journal2A2 (June): 10-12.

-, 1989. “The Familiar Entity and Dual Ref¬
erence in the Latent Encounter.” MUFON UFO
Journal 251 (March): 10-12.

-, 1994. “Dual Reference in the UFO En¬
counter.” In Andrea Pritchard, David E.
Pritchard, John E. Mack, Pam Kasey, and Clau¬
dia Yapp, eds. Alien Discussions: Proceedings of the
Abduction Study Conference, 142-148. Cam¬
bridge, MA: North Cambridge Press.

Dugja

According to members of a small group called
Elan Vital (Vital Essence), the last queen of
the lost continent of Lemuria, Dugja (pro¬
nounced doo-ja), reigns as “Spirit of the
Mountain.” The mountain is Shasta, in far
northern California, the focus of many occult

beliefs and legends. Dugja materializes when¬
ever her mood or the situation, calls for it.

One member claimed that in 1963, while
meditating on Mount Shasta’s Grey Butte, he
sensed an “astral man,” with thin hair, white
beard, and pink skin, warning him telepathi-
cally to turn back. When he ignored the threats
and entreaties, other astral entities joined with
the first one. Nonetheless, undaunted, the man
ended his meditation and continued his trek
up the mountain. Soon he encountered Dugja,
who greeted him warmly and invited him to
stay for a time. He returned to Shasta three
years later. Since then, he told reporter Emilie
A. Frank in the 1970s, he had visited the queen
on many occasions in both physical and out-
of-body states. “I am also responsible for clean¬
ing negative light forces around Mount Shasta
and elsewhere in the world,” he said. “These
light forces affect the population, and in order
to make the world a better place ... I polarize
their negative influences. Eventually they will
all be pure. In the meantime, I make many as¬
tral trips to Mount Shasta in order to purify the
lights” (Frank, 1998).

Further Reading

Frank, Emilie A., 1998. Mt. Shasta: California’s Mys -
tic Mountain. Hilt, CA: Photografix Publishing.

Earth Coincidence Control Office

Scientist John Lilly, best known for his pio¬
neering researches into dolphins and into al¬
tered states of consciousness, was on an air¬
liner approaching Los Angeles when he had
his first communication from an intelligence
he would come to call Earth Coincidence
Control Office. He received a psychic message
that said, “We will now make a demonstra¬
tion of our power over the solid-state control
systems upon the planet Earth. In thirty sec¬
onds, we will shut off all electronic equipment
in the Los Angeles airport. Your airplane will
be unable to land there and will have to be
shunted to another airport” (Lilly, 1978). Sure
enough, the power blackout occurred, forcing
Lilly’s plane to land at Burbank; another plane
crashed.

In a visionary experience not long after¬
ward, Lilly witnessed the future of the human
race. A solid-state intelligence, consisting of
all computers and electronic systems, will as¬
sume control of everything and become too
powerful for human beings to do anything
about. By the 2500s this intelligence will be in
communication with its counterparts else¬
where in the Milky Way.

Lilly believed himself to be in contact with
the water-based—as opposed to solid-state—
entities in the universe. The two intelligences,

the latter always the creation of the former, are
in conflict all through the universe. Water-
based beings from elsewhere are paying close
attention to developments on Earth and send¬
ing humans constant telepathic messages that
usually register, at least where humans are con¬
cerned, only on a subliminal level. These be¬
ings (the Earth Coincidence Control Office, in
Lilly’s phrasing) seek to influence human evo¬
lution in such a way that humans do not be¬
come enslaved to their technology. The other
intelligences that share our planet—dolphins
and whales—are more psychically attuned to
these messages and receive them clearly. Lilly
holds that “whales and dolphins quite naturally
go in the direction we call spiritual, in that they
get into meditative states quite simply and eas¬
ily. . . . Dolphins have a highly developed con¬
sciousness, and a powerful connection to
higher realities” (Lilly, 1972).

Beginning in the 1950s, Lilly had experi¬
mented with sensory deprivation. He would
place himself in a tank of water in a totally
dark, silent room. In due course he would un¬
dergo vivid hallucinations. To him these hal¬
lucinations became more real than reality. He
came to believe that through them he entered
other dimensions of existence and grew aware
that this dimension and others harbor innu¬
merable varieties of intelligent entities.

92 Elder Race

Further Reading

Lilly, John C., 1972. The Center of the Cyclone: An
Atitobiography of Inner Space. New York: Julian
Press.

-, 1978. The Scientist: A Novel Autobiography.

New York: J. B. Lippincott.

Elder Race

The Elder Race, also known as Els, was the
first extraterrestrial group ever to arrive on
Earth. They showed up one billion years ago
after already having colonized a considerable
portion of the galaxy. But on Earth, these be¬
ings—originally twelve feet tall, male and fe¬
male (though “not as we think of sex differen¬
tiation today” [Williamson, 1959]), and many
one-eyed—radically changed. Earth would be
the last planet in which they existed in physi¬
cal bodies. During their stay on Earth, they
conquered matter, energy, space, and time,
becoming “the legendary ‘gods’” able to proj¬
ect via mental powers “any amount of matter

in any degree of density or intensity to any
place on Earth at any time.” In their under¬
ground city near Lake Titicaca, along what is
now the Peru-Bolivia border, they built a vast
control room, a kind of “Earth Center.”

In this and other underground realms, they
left vast libraries on which the history of the
universe is recorded on crystal devices encased
in magnetic fields. On occasion, a psychically
sensitive individual is able to tap into these
records.

Further Reading

Williamson, George Hunt, 1959. Road in the Sky.

London: Neville Spearman.

Elvis as Jesus

In a book published in 2000, Cinda Godfrey
concludes that Elvis Presley was the Mes¬
siah—the returned Jesus Christ. She writes
that she began her research in 1992, deter¬
mined to disprove any connection between
the two, only to find “mind-boggling evidence

Stephanie G. Pierce, Celebrity Spokesminister for the 24 Hour Church of Elvis, stands inside the church’s inner sanctum.
(MacduffEverton/CORBIS)

Emmanuel 93

that the prophecies throughout the [Bible] fit
both Elvis and Jesus like a glove.”

Among the similarities: Both Jesus and
Elvis are called The King. Jesus was the
Rock; Elvis (at least according to Godfrey)
invented rock. Jesus was the Son, and Elvis
began his recording career on the Sun label.
“The name numbers for Jesus and Elvis both
equal nine,” she says. “In fact, their name-
numbers match exactly, letter for letter and
number for number: Jesus = 15363, Elvis =
53613.” Their followers worshipped and
adored them. Both could heal and read
minds, and both had powerful enemies who
sought to stop them. Godfrey claims that
like Jesus, Elvis was Jewish.

She also notes that the Bible frequently
refers to the Voice of God on many occasions.
“Is there any voice more spectacular than Elvis
Presley’s?” she asks. The Psalms even predict
that Presley one day would disappear: “I am
shut up and I cannot come forth” (Psalms
88:8) and “Plow long, Lord? Wilt thou hide
thyself forever?” (Psalms 89:46). Isaiah 4:2
states that when the Messiah comes, “In that
day shall the branch [Messiah] of the Lord be
beautiful and glorious.” Godfrey remarks,
“Now, picture Elvis at his Aloha from Hawaii
concert, resplendent in his jeweled American
Eagle jumpsuit. Curiously enough, the eagle
is also a symbol for Christ” (Godfrey, 2000).

According to Godfrey (as well as more
mainstream Presley biographers such as Peter
Guralnick), Presley had a religious vision in
the Arizona desert in March 1965. Just out¬
side Flagstaff, as Presley was driving his bus
with his spiritual advisor Larry Geller sitting
next to him, he saw a cloud in a clear sky and
swore that he could see the face of the late So¬
viet dictator Josef Stalin in it. The image faded
as the cloud’s shape changed, so Presley imag¬
ined, into the face of Jesus. He pulled the bus
over to the side of the road and ran into the
desert, feeling a sense of deep spiritual trans¬
formation. Geller would claim that Presley
later wondered if maybe he was indeed Christ.

Godfrey contends that Elvis Aron Presley’s
own name proves his godhood. “El” means

God, “vis” from power—thus “God Power.”
“Presley” derives from “priestly.” She goes on,
“In fact, all three of Elvis’ major residences
contain the prophetic ‘EL’: Gracc/and, Tupc/o
and B el Air. Furthermore, according to the
Bible, since Jesus’ crucifixion, we are living in
the Dispensation of ‘Grace’—that 2,000 year
period of time when sins are pardoned by the
sacrificial death of Christ. The name of Elvis
Presley’s mansion: ‘GRACE-LAND’!” And,
she adds, did not Jesus say, “I am Alpha and
Omega, the beginning and the ending,” just
as Elvis said, “I am and I was”?

Godfrey goes outside Scripture to delve
into esoteric literature for further evidence,
citing among other sources the prophecies of
Nostradamus and Edgar Cayce. Noting one
occultist interpretation of the Great Pyramid
(not shared by Egyptologists), she writes that
the Great Pyramid was a monument to
Christ, allegedly known to the Egyptians as
“Orion.” The pyramid’s structure, read prop¬
erly, foretells the return of Christ sometime
around 2000. “Elvis Presley has been men¬
tioned in connection with the name Orion on
many occasions,” she observes, “including
Gail Giorgio’s 1978 bestseller, Orion, about a
godlike singer who faked his death and disap¬
peared” (Godfrey, 2000).

Further Reading

Godfrey, Cinda, 2000. The Elvis-Jesus Mystery—The
Shocking Scriptural and Scientific Evidence That
Elvis Presley Coidd Be the Messiah Anticipated
throughout History. New Philadelphia, OH: Reve¬
lation Press.

Guralnick, Peter, 1999. Careless Love: The Unmaking
of Elvis Presley. Boston, MA: Back Bay Books.

Emmanuel

First seen clairvoyantly as a “being of golden
light” (Rodegast and Stanton, 1985), Em¬
manuel was a popular channeling entity dur¬
ing the New Age boom of the 1980s. Em¬
manuel, who spoke through Pat Rodegast, did
not ever explain exactly who or what he was,
insisting only that he was physically real but
hinting that he had a body that human beings
might not be comfortable seeing. He made a

94 Eunethia

particular impression on psychologist and
guru Baba Ram Dass (the former Richard
Alpert, who worked with Timothy Leary on
early LSD research and advocacy).

Emmanuel taught that “the separation” of
human beings from God was only temporary,
and it served a larger purpose. Through it,
human beings have gained the knowledge
they need to reunite with the divine and be¬
come cocreators with God.

See Also: Channeling

Further Reading

Rodegast, Pat, and Judith Stanton, eds., 1985.
Emmanuel’s Book: A Manual for Living Com -
fortably in the Cosmos. New York: Some Friends
of Emmanuel.

Eunethia

Eunethia, who channels through Yvonne
Cole, commands the starship Venusia, serving
the Ashtar Command. She and her crew orig¬
inally came from Venus but now live in a large
ship that orbits Earth. Their purpose is to ob -
serve and to teach humans. They are also here
to prepare humans for the great upheavals
that will soon occur in response to their long
abuse of the Earth.

According to Eunethia, more than fourteen
planetary species are involved in the Earth
project. “When the call went out for volun¬
teers to assist planet Earth,” she says, “the re¬
sponse came from all areas of the Universe.
Most interaction is in the form of telepathic
contact” (Bryant and Seebach, 1991), though
relatively few humans are sufficiently devel¬
oped in their psychic powers to communicate.

Further Reading

Bryant, Alice, and Linda Seebach, 1991. Healing
Shattered Reality: Understanding Contactee
Trauma. Tigard, OR: Wildflower Press.

Extraterrestrial biological entities

According to a body of modern folklore, the
United States government has established se¬
cret contact with space people, whom it calls
“extraterrestrial biological entities,” or EBEs

(ee-buhs). It also has retrieved the bodies of
dead EBEs from crashed UFOs such as the
one that came down near Roswell, New Mex¬
ico, in early July 1947.

Such rumors have been in circulation since
the earliest days of the UFO controversy,
which began with a sighting by private pilot
Kenneth Arnold of nine “flying saucers” over
Mount Rainier, Washington, on June 24,
1947. One of the first rumors alleged that a
giant spacecraft landed not far from Juneau,
Alaska, in mid-1948, and in the first inter¬
planetary conference, President Harry Tru¬
man, along with his top aides and high-rank¬
ing military officers, met with its occupants,
who were friendly and humble. In the 1950s,
George FFunt Williamson, a contactee and
popular author of saucerian books, wrote that
“a highly secret operation known as Project
NQ-707,” headquartered at Edwards Air
Force Base in the California desert, had estab¬
lished radio contact with flying saucers and
was trying to get them to “land at a ren¬
dezvous point near Salton Sea in Southern
California” (Williamson, 1953). Williamson’s
friend George Adamski insisted that the U.S.
government and space people regularly spoke
with one another. Fie would even claim that
in 1962 he boarded an alien spaceship at an
air force base on his way to a conference on
Saturn.

In 1956, England’s Flying Saucer Review
published startling revelations by a contribu¬
tor identified only as a “special correspon¬
dent.” The correspondent asserted that a
highly placed American official had confided
to him that UFOs were known to contain
friendly space visitors who were trying to find
a way to breathe Earth’s atmosphere before
landing and declaring themselves. The maga¬
zine revealed nine years later that its unnamed
informant was one “Rolf Alexander, M.D.,”
and that the official was the late general and
diplomat George C. Marshall. It did not men¬
tion that “Alexander” was in fact an ex-convict
whose real name was Allan Alexander Stirling.
“Alexander” claimed vast psychokinetic pow¬
ers that allowed him to break up clouds.

Extraterrestrials among us 95

A related rumor held that the government
did not dare to release its knowledge of extra¬
terrestrial visitation for fear of panic. There¬
fore, it had embarked on an indoctrination
program through which, by judicious leaks
and UFO-themed movies and television
shows, the public would get used to the no¬
tion and therefore be able to handle the news
when it was time to deliver it.

In the early 1980s, a darker version of the
legend came to the fore. This time it was tied
to nightmarish conspiracy theories, in which a
malevolent “secret government” worked with
hostile aliens to enslave the world’s population.
Via abductions the aliens received certain bio¬
logical materials they needed to survive, and
the secret government, in turn, got access to
advanced extraterrestrial technology. These
speculations were tied to traditional conspiracy
theories, sometimes with barely concealed
anti-Semitic overtones. One of the move¬
ment’s critics, Jerome Clark, coined the phrase
“Dark Side” to characterize it. One principal
Dark Sider, Milton William Cooper, claimed
to have read highly classified documents that
reported that alien technology made time
travel possible. Both the space people and the
secret government had learned that World War
III would erupt in 1995 and escalate into nu¬
clear conflict in 1999, preparing Earth for the
Second Coming of Christ in 2011.

See Also: Abductions by UFOs; Adamski, George;
Contactees; Holloman aliens; Williamson, George
Hunt

Further Reading

Andrews, George C., 1986. Extra-TerrestrialsAmong
Us. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications.

Clark, Jerome, 1998. “Dark Side.” In The UFO Ency -
clopedia. Second Edition: The Phenomenon from the
Beginning, 301-319. Detroit, MI: Omnigraphics.

Cooper, Milton William, 1991. Behold a Pale Horse.
Sedona, AZ: Light Technology Publishing.

Ellis, Bill, 1991. “Cattle Mutilation: Contemporary
Legends and Contemporary Mythologies.” Con -
temporary Legend 1: 39-80.

“Let’s Talk Space: ‘Flying Saucers Are Real,”’ 1956.
Flying Saucer Review!, 1 (January): 2-5.

“Report Tells of ‘ Top Brass’ Attending Saucer Land¬
ing,” 1955. Flying Saucer News-Service Research
Bulletin 1, 9 (August 20): 3.

“Rolf Alexander, M.D.,” and “Thoughts on UFOs
by Dr. Rolf Alexander,” 1965. Flying Saucer Re -
view (March/April): 9.

Williamson, George Hunt, 1953. Other Tongues —
Other Flesh. Amherst, WI: Amherst Press.

Extraterrestrials among us

According to flying-saucer contactees, hu¬
manlike beings from other planets walk the
streets of the Earth, undetected and unsus¬
pected by oblivious earthlings.

George Hunt Williamson, for example, de¬
clared that the program to infiltrate Earth
began in the late nineteenth century. “Space
visitors were actually deposited and left on our
world to mix, mate, and marry with us,” he
wrote. “The new ideas and theories first came
out in book form [in various scientific and oc¬
cult texts], and this was the prelude to the ap¬
pearance of spacecraft in the skies of Earth”
(Williamson, 1953). In our time, the extrater¬
restrial agents, whom Williamson called the
Wanderers, have helped turn our attention to
science fiction and space travel, among other
things. In a subsequent book, Williamson
would argue that the Hopi and Navajo tribes
long ago came to Earth from Mars and Lu-
cifer-Maldek (a destroyed planet whose re¬
mains comprise what we now call the asteroid
belt).

In February 1953 Williamson’s friend
George Adamski met a Martian on the streets
of Los Angeles. The Martian told him, “At
our work and in our leisure time, we mingle
with people here on Earth, never betraying
the secret that we are inhabitants of other
worlds” (Adamski, 1955). Those who knew
Adamski took his claims of Earthbound extra¬
terrestrials seriously because they believed that
on occasion they had seen these beings. Lou
Zinsstag was Adamski’s most energetic Euro¬
pean supporter, and she accompanied him
during much of a lecture tour he conducted
on the continent in 1959. Adamski confided
to her that Venusian men—he called them
“boys”—regularly had been meeting with him
in his hotel rooms on mornings. One after¬
noon, Zinsstag recalled, she was sitting in a

96 Extraterrestrials among us

sidewalk cafe outside Adamski’s hotel when
she happened to notice a handsome young
man wearing sun glasses. She was unable to
place his nationality. Shortly thereafter,
Adamski, who had been resting in his room,
came outside, smiling broadly, “his eyes
sparkling with pleasure.” He was also smiling
at the young man, who smiled back. Adamski
was unable to keep his eyes off the man, who
eventually departed, “greeting George and me
with a most friendly and prolonged smile”
(Zinsstag, 1990). When Zinsstag asked
Adamski if this were one of the Venusian
“boys,” he said yes.

Another account comes from Adamski as¬
sociate C. A. Honey, who recalled, “I was
with Adamski in 1958 during a meeting
with three little people who he claimed had
come to Earth from Venus. I saw them and
talked with one of them but I don’t know if
they were anything other than what I saw—
little people” (Honey, 1979). In an earlier
version of the story, Honey told of seeing a
small, blond woman in a roadside cafe while
he and Adamski were on a trip to Oregon.
Noticing that Adamski appeared “shocked,”
Honey studied her carefully. From a dis¬
tance, he said, she looked to be no more
than twelve years old, but up close she ap¬
peared middle-aged. She “let me know she
was reading my thoughts” (Honey, 1959).
The next day, when Honey told Adamski he
thought she was a spacewoman, Adamski
agreed and later asserted that space people
had informed him that she was the sister of
Kalna, a Venusian spacewoman friend of
Adamski’s.

Another prominent 1950s contactee, Tru¬
man Bethurum, claimed to have encountered
his spacewoman friend Aura Rhanes on a
sidewalk in Las Vegas. When he greeted her,
she “turned around but did not seem to want
to be recognized, for she shook her head and
just walked across the street and joined a
crowd waiting for a bus,” according to Bethu¬
rum (Bethurum, 1954).

Much contactee doctrine concerning earth-
bound extraterrestrials focuses more on the

souls of these beings than on the particular
bodies they happen to inhabit. Within the
contactee underground, many people believe
they themselves were space people in previous
incarnations; a lifetime or lifetimes ago they
made the decision to be born as earthlings so
to work toward the changes that will prepare
humankind for membership in the Galactic
Federation. In the 1970s and 1980s, the con¬
cept of “Star People,” championed by writer
Brad Steiger, gained popularity in New Age
circles. Steiger wrote that Star People were os¬
tensible humans but in fact reincarnated ex¬
traterrestrials; Star People shared certain phys¬
ical and psychological features with each
other, and they also had experienced other¬
worldly realities all their lives, even if con¬
sciously they did not recognize their signifi¬
cance. Less benignly, some writers have
suggested that the menacing men in black
who threaten investigators and witnesses are
evil aliens.

In the era of UFO abductions some re¬
searchers reported that their female subjects
had undergone mysteriously terminated preg¬
nancies, only to be abducted at a later date to
be shown an alien-human hybrid child who,
they were led to believe, was their own. These
hybrids had both human and alien features in
varying proportions. On occasion, abductees
would encounter the more human-looking
hybrids in real-life situations. David M. Ja¬
cobs, in The Threat (1998), proposed the
alarming theory that hybrids are being bred to
replace the human race at some point in the
not-distant future.

The abduction era also produced a story
told by a man whose credentials seem impec¬
cable, a New York book editor and former
Washington correspondent for Newsweek.
There was also a confirmatory witness, the
man’s wife. In January 1987, the publishing
house William Morrow had just released the
destined-to-be bestseller Communion, Whit¬
ley Strieber’s account of his personal abduc¬
tion experiences. The editor, Bruce Lee,
claimed that just as the book was starting to
show up on the stalls, he and his wife ven-

Extraterrestrials among us 97

tured into Womrath’s bookstore on Manhat¬
tan’s Lexington Avenue. As he related to New
York writer Tracy Cochran, the two noticed a
very short couple, bundled up in winter
clothes, looking over a copy of Communion
and complaining about how Strieber had got¬
ten things wrong. They spoke “rapidly in
what sounded like educated Upper East Side
Jewish accents.” When Lee introduced him¬
self as a William Morrow employee and asked
politely what it was they did not like about
the book, the man ignored him, but the
woman communicated such “complete
loathing, hatred” that the Lees retreated in
shock (Conroy, 1989). They noticed that the
strange couple were wearing large tinted
glasses that did not entirely hide large “dark,
almond-shaped eyes.” Lee later took—and
passed—a polygraph test.

See Also: Abductions by UFOs; Adamski, George;
Alien diners; Aura Rhanes; Bethurum, Truman;
Contactees; Hybrid beings; Men in black; Star
People; Strieber, Whitley; Wanderers; William¬
son, George Hunt

Further Reading

Adamski, George, 1955. Inside the Space Ships. New
York: Abelard-Schuman.

Bethurum, Truman, 1954. Aboard a Flying Saucer.

Los Angeles: DeVorss and Company.

Cochran, Tracy, 1987. “Invasion of the Strieber
Snatchers.” New York (March 30): 26.

Conroy, Ed, 1989. Report on “Communion”: An Inde -
pendent Investigation of and Commentary on Whit -
ley Strieber’s “Communion. ” New York: William
Morrow.

Honey, C. A., 1959. “Mail Bag: Belief Confirmed.”
Flying Saucer Review 5, 2 (March/April): 32-33.

-, 1979. “Report from the Readers.” Fate 32,

5 (May): 113-115.

Jacobs, David M., 1998. The Threat. New York:
Simon and Schuster.

Keel, John A., 1970. UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse.

New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

Steiger, Brad, 1976. Gods of Aquarius: UFOs and the
Transformation of Man. New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich.

Williamson, George Hunt, 1959. Road in the Sky.

London: Neville Spearman.

Zinsstag, Lou, 1990. UFO... George Adamski:
Their Man on Earth. Tucson, AZ: UFO Photo
Archives.

Fairies encountered

Traditions of fairy folk can be found anywhere
in the world, but they are usually spoken of in
the past tense. What is less well known is that
such beliefs derive not just from distant folk¬
lore but from perceived experiences of a sort
that are still reported from time to time even
today. British anomalist Janet Bord writes,
“Today the knowledge of and belief in fairies
has all but died out among country
people. . . . However[,] the changes that have
occurred this century have not resulted in the
complete extinction of the fairies: they have
survived, because people still see them” (Bord,
1997). Though Victorian popular culture per¬
petrated the notion that fairies are gauzy¬
winged creatures, the fairies of tradition have
no wings. Beyond that, they vary in appear¬
ance from region to region, though most are
small and humanlike, sometimes with brown
or green skin. They are of uncertain tempera¬
ment and, thus, best avoided.

Collectors of folklore—a notion and disci¬
pline that came into existence around 1800—
came upon many firsthand accounts. These
can be found in any number of scholarly texts
on fairy lore. Though sometimes puzzled by
the apparent sincerity of their informants, few
folklorists were willing to take the leap of faith
required to embrace actual belief in fairies.

One who did, however, was the well-regarded
W. Y. Evans-Wentz, an anthropologist of reli¬
gion who had a Ph.D. from Oxford Univer¬
sity. In the first decade of the twentieth cen¬
tury, Evans-Wentz traveled through the Celtic
regions of the British Isles as well as Brittany
(on France’s northwest coast). The result was a
folklore classic, The Fairy Faith in Celtic
Countries (originally published in 1911).
Aside from its worth as a record of surviving
fairy beliefs and associated superstitions, it is
unique in its championing of an underlying
reality behind the tradition. Like the pioneer¬
ing Rev. Robert Kirk, a Scottish clergyman
whose The Secret Common-Wealth (1691) pre¬
served fairy lore in the Highlands, Evans-
Wentz deduced that fairies live in an other-
world that overlaps with the human world.
He went so far as to claim that “we can postu¬
late scientifically, on the showing of the data
of psychical research, the existence of such in¬
visible intelligences as gods, genii, daemons,
all kinds of true fairies, and disembodied
men.”

Not all purported witnesses were the uned¬
ucated rural folk stereotypically associated
with fairy beliefs and encounters. A seven¬
teenth-century Swedish clergyman, Peter
Rahm, gave this sworn statement to legal au¬
thorities:

A man is prilled back before he enters a fairy circle. (Fortean Picture Library)

In the year 1660, when 1 and my wife had
gone to my farm, which is three quarters of a
mile from Ragunda parsonage, and we were
sitting there and talking awhile, late in the
evening, there came a little man in at the door,
who begged of my wife to go and aid his wife,
who was just in the pains of labor. The fellow
was of small size, of a dark complexion, and
dressed in old gray clothes. My wife and I sat
awhile, and wondered at the man; for we were
aware that he was a Troll, and we had heard tell
that such like, called by the peasantry Vettar
[spirits], always used to keep in the farm¬
houses, when people left them in harvest-time.
But when he had urged his request four or five
times, and we thought on what evil the coun¬
try folk say that they have at times suffered
from the Vettar, when they have chance to
swear at them, or with uncivil words bid them
to go to hell, I took the resolution to read some
prayers over my wife, and to bless her, and bid
her in God’s name go with him. She took in
haste some old linen with her, and went along
in the wind, and so she came to a room, on
one side of which was a little dark chamber, in
which his wife lay in bed in great agony. My

wife went up to her, and, after a little while,
aided her till she brought forth the child after
the same manner as other human beings. The
man then offered her food, and when she re¬
fused it, he thanked her, and accompanied her
out, and then she was carried along, in the
same way in the wind, and after a while came
again to the gate, just at 10 o’clock. Mean¬
while, a quantity of old pieces and clippings of
silver were laid on a shelf, in the sitting-room,
and my wife found them next day, when she
was putting the room in order. It is supposed
that they were laid there by the Vettar. That it
in truth so happened, I witness, by inscribing
my name. Ragunda, the 12th of April, 1671
(Keightley, 1878).

Another cleric, Edward Williams, a British
man from the next century, recalled a strange
experience from his youth. In 1757, he and
his fellow schoolchildren, playing in a field in
Wales, happened to notice seven or eight tiny
couples. Each was dressed in red, and each
held a white kerchief. They were about a hun¬
dred yards away. One of the figures suddenly

Fairies encountered 101

took after a child and nearly caught him. Up
close, the children got, in Williams’s words, a
“full and clear view of his ancient, swarthy,
grim complexion.” During the chase another
of the male figures shouted at the pursuer in
an unknown language (Jones, 1979). Wil¬
liams, who went on to become a prominent
man of the cloth, never forgot the incident
but was never able to explain it. “I am forced
to classify it among my unknowables,” he
wrote (Jones, 1979).

The inherent implausibility of fairies
notwithstanding, “sightings” have been re¬
corded even in recent years. On August 10,
1977, while patrolling in the early morning
hours, a Hull, England, police constable came
upon a fog bank in a nearby field. When the
fog lifted, he saw three small figures dancing:
a man dressed in a “sleeveless jerkin, with
tight-fitting trousers” and two women clad in
“bonnets, shawls and white dresses”—hardly
late twentieth-century clothing. Assuming
they were drunks, the officer got out of his car
and walked toward them, only to see them
vanish in front of his eyes. Many fairy ac¬
counts describe the beings’ love of dancing.
During World War II, for example, W. E.
Thorner, making his way with great difficulty
through a furious storm along a clifftop on
Hoy in the Orkney Islands, was startled to
come upon small creatures “with long, dark,
bedraggled hair.” They were dancing wildly,
“seeming to throw themselves over the cliff
edge” (Marwick, 1975).

An incident in County Carlow, Ireland, in
November 1959 claimed four witnesses. In
Dunroe, a man named John Byrne was using
a bulldozer to move a large bush when a man
no more than three feet tall abruptly dashed
out from underneath it. He fled across a field
and was lost to view after he jumped over a
fence. Three other men observed the peculiar
occurrence. As late as the early 1990s, fifteen-
year-old Brian Collins, vacationing with his
parents in the Aran Islands off west Donegal,
was taking an early morning walk when he
spotted two men fishing in the sea from an
overlooking bank. Three and a half feet tall,

dressed in green, and wearing brown boots,
they were engaged in a laugh-punctuated con¬
versation in Gaelic. Apparently aware of his
presence, they jumped off the bank and were
gone. As he looked for them, the youth found
a pipe that he thought was one of theirs. He
put it in a locked drawer, from which it subse¬
quently disappeared. He saw the beings again,
and this time he tried to photograph and
tape-record them, but nothing of them devel¬
oped on either film or tape.

A series of “sightings” in 1938, in West
Limerick, began when schoolboy John Keely
met a two-foot-tall man, dressed in red, on a
road. When Keely asked him where he was
from, the strange man snapped, “I’m from the
mountains, and it’s all equal to you what my
business is.” The next day Keely and friends
returned to the scene. The friends hid in the
bushes while Keely approached a group of
fairies. One took his hand, and they walked
together for a short distance. The fairies ran
away, however, when they saw the boys in the
bushes. Other men and boys reported their
own encounters in the same area at the same
time, and the Dublin-based Irish Press carried
stories. The men had chased the fairies, but as
one witness put it, “they jumped the ditches
as fast as a greyhound. . . . Though they
passed through hedges, ditches, and marshes,
they appeared neat and clean all the time.”
Witnesses said the beings had “hard, hairy
faces like men, and no ears” (Barry, 1938).

On a casual walk along the shore of a
peninsula in Scotland’s Western Highlands
one day in 1972, Artie Traum, an American
folk singer, heard unusual sounds. As he lis¬
tened more carefully, he realized they were
voices, though he could see no one around.
They were singing “run, man, run” in a weird
harmony while fiddles and pipes played be¬
hind them. As the sounds grew ever louder,
Traum panicked and fled into a nearby
woods. Though he still saw nothing, he heard
crackling sounds and “great motion” as if he
were being pursued. As all this was happen¬
ing, “my head was swarming with thousands
of voices, thousands of words making no

102 Fairies encountered

sense.” He found his way back to open air,
and the voices and the music ceased (Traum,
1972). Traum’s experience is like many re¬
counted in the tradition. Fairies are reputed to
drive trespassers off their home turf and, also,
to love music. Both folk fiddlers and at least
one classical composer (Thomas Wood) claim
to have heard fairy music; a nineteenth-cen¬
tury Manx fiddler, William Cain, was not
alone in learning such a melody and incorpo¬
rating it into his repertoire.

The American Indian tribes had their own
versions of fairy traditions, but the Europeans
who settled the North American continent—
except for places where Celtic customs took
firm root, such as Newfoundland—fairly
quickly discarded their own. Nonetheless, oc¬
casional incidents in which fairylike figures
appeared, even if not identified by the witness
as such, have allegedly occurred. All of his life,
Harry Anderson remembered something that
had happened to him one summer night in
1919, when he was walking alone down a
rural road near Barron, Wisconsin. To his
considerable surprise, his solitary stroll was in¬
terrupted by the approach of twenty little
men trooping in single file under the bright
moonlight. They were heading in his direc¬
tion. Everything about them was odd: they
were shirtless, bald, pale-faced, and dressed in
leather knee pants. “Mumbling” sounds came
out of their mouths; yet they did not seem to
be talking with each other. As they passed the
young man, they seemed oblivious of or indif¬
ferent to his presence. By now Anderson was
so unnerved that he continued on his way
without ever looking back.

In Canby, Oregon, one day in April 1950,
Ellen Jonerson was working on her lawn when
she happened to glance over at her neighbor’s
yard and saw a bizarre sight: a twelve-inch lit¬
tle man of stocky build with a tanned face; he
was clad in overalls and plaid shirt. He had
what looked like a skullcap on his head. Jon¬
erson ran inside to make a quick call about it
to a friend. When she returned, the figure was
walking away with a “waddling” motion. He
passed under a parked car and was seen no

more. At no time did the idea that she was
seeing what some would call a “fairy” enter
Jonerson’s mind, and her report is generally
thought of as a UFO-related close encounter
of the third kind, though no UFO was seen.

Inevitably, some have called UFO encoun¬
ters a modern form of fairy belief. Among the
first to do so was Jacques Vallee, author of
Passport to Magonia (1969).Vallee offered an
occult-oriented interpretation that speculated
that an incomprehensible otherworld has in¬
teracted with humankind for thousands of
years, producing manifestations that are fil¬
tered through human consciousness and ex¬
pectation, thus changing to reflect different
times and cultures. (Kirk had concluded as
much in the late seventeenth century. Fairies,
of a “middle nature between man and angel,”
dress and speak “like the people and country
under which they live” [Sanderson, 1976].)
Vallee went so far as to declare flatly—if, as
critics charged, hyperbolically—that “the
modern, global belief in flying saucers and
their occupants is identical to an earlier belief
in the fairy-faith. The entities described as the
pilots of the craft are indistinguishable from
the elves, sylphs, and lutins.” Debunkers such
as Robert Sheaffer have employed a different
sort of argument to the effect that flying
saucers and their occupants are as much a
delusion as fairies and fairyland. Neither ap¬
proach, however, seems a wholly adequate
way of explaining the mysteries inherent in
such encounters, which paradoxically offer up
“real”-seeming encounters with things that al¬
most certainly do not exist in the conven¬
tional understanding of the verb.

Fairies have found new life among New
Age visionaries and channelers and other ex¬
plorers of the far edges of consciousness. One
writer remarks, “There are two major differ¬
ences between the old oral traditional or an¬
cestral faery contacts and those of contem¬
porary humanity removed from oral
tradition. . . . The first is that while our ances¬
tors often sought to break away from the faery
realm, many modern contacts are intentional.
They are induced or encouraged by various

Fairy captures 103

means, ranging from naive New Age nuttiness
to expansions and willed changes of awareness
involving techniques handed down within the
old traditions, but developed and applied in a
modern way” (Stewart, 1995). New Age
fairies are a gentler lot than their harsh coun¬
terparts in tradition. Fairies are now incorpo¬
rated into such concerns as healing, garden¬
ing, Earth awareness, ritual magic, and
personal transformation—matters far re¬
moved from the often ill-tempered, impa¬
tient, anthrophobic concerns of traditional
fairies.

See Also: Chaneques; Close encounters of the third
kind; Cottingley fairies; Fairy captures; Magonia;
Whites little people

Further Reading

Barry, John, 1938. “Fairies in Eire.” The Living Age
355 (November): 265-266.

Bord, Janet, 1997. Fairies: Real Encounters with Little
People. New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers.

Briggs, Katharine, 1976. An Encyclopedia of Fairies:
Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies, and Other Supernat -
ural Creattires. New York: Pantheon Books.

Davis, Isabel L., 1970. Review ofVallee’s Passport to
Magonia. UFO Investigator (June): 3.

Evans, Alex, 1978. “Encounters with Little Men.”
Fate 31,11 (November): 83-86.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., 1966. The Fairy-Faith in Celtic
Countries. New York: University Books.

Galde, Phyllis, 1993. “I See by the Papers: More
Fairies Seen.” Fate AG, 4 (April): 14-15.

Jones, T. Gwynn, 1979. Welsh Folklore and Folk-Cus -
tom. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield.

Keightley, Thomas, 1878. The Fairy Mythology. Lon¬
don: G. Bell.

MacManus, D. A., 1959. The Middle Kingdom: The
Faerie World of Ireland. London: Max Parrish.

Marwick, Ernest W., 1975. The Folklore of Orkney
and Shetland. London: B. T. Batsford.

Narvaez, Peter, ed., 1997. The Good People: New
Fairylore Essays. Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky.

Rojcewicz, Peter M., 1984. The Boundaries of Ortho -
doxy: A Folkloric Look at the UFO Phenomenon.
Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.

Sanderson, Stewart, ed., 1976. The Secret Common-
Wealth and A Short Treatise of Charms and Spels by
Robert Kirk. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield.

Sheaffer, Robert, 1981. The UFO Verdict: Examining
the Evidence. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.

Stewart, R. J., 1995. The Living World of Faery.
Glastonbury, Somerset, England: Gothic Image
Publications.

Traum, Artie, 1972. “Rollin’ and Tumblin’: The
Cambridge Festival.” Crawdaddy (November):
20 - 22 .

Vallee, Jacques, 1969. Passport to Magonia: From Folk -
lore to Flying Saucers. Chicago: Henry Regnery.

Wilkins, Harold T., 1952. “Pixie-Haunted Moor.”
Fate 5, 5 (July/August): 110-116.

Fairy captures

In 1907, Lady Archibald Campbell, a collec¬
tor of traditional lore, interviewed a blind
man and his wife who lived in conditions of
great poverty in an Irish glen. The man told
her, in all apparent seriousness, that once he
had captured a small being he called a lep¬
rechaun. It was two feet tall, with dark but
clear skin and red hair. He was dressed in a
red cap, green clothes, and boots.

“I gripped him close in my arms and took
him home,” the old man related. “I called to
the woman [his wife] to look at what I had
got. ‘What doll is it that you have there?’ she
cried. ‘A living one,’ I said, and put it on the
dresser. We feared to lose it; we kept the door
locked. It talked and muttered to itself queer
words. ... It might have been near on a fort¬
night since we had the fairy, when I said to
the woman, ‘Sure, if we show it in the great
city we will be made up [rich]. So we put it in
a cage. At night we would leave the cage door
open, and we would hear it stirring through
the house. . . . We fed it on bread and rice and
milk out of a cup at the end of a spoon.”

At last the little being escaped, and after
that the family’s fortunes, never much to
begin with, declined even further. The man
lost his sight, and the couple sank ever deeper
into poverty and despair.

A happier story recounts not so much the
capture of a fairy as the domestication of one.
Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats heard it from
an old couple, the Kellehers, who lived in the
Wickland Mountains of Ireland. The Kelle¬
hers said the events had taken place years be¬
fore, when they were newly married.

One winter day, Mr. Kelleher encountered
a fairy and, in some unspecified fashion, got
him to stay in the house for the next week or

104 Fossilized aliens

two. Dressed in a red cap and red clothes, the
fairy was about fifteen inches tall and seemed
friendly, though he kept silent. At night he
slept on the dresser. The Kellers told others of
their unusual guest, and sometimes “when the
boys at the public-house were full of porter,
they used to come to the house to look at
him, and they would laugh to see him, but I
never let them hurt him.” Kelleher fed him
bread and milk with a spoon. As the days
passed, the couple noticed, he seemed to age,
taking on “a sort of wrinkled look.”

The fairy left them one evening after an¬
other of its kind had appeared near the prop¬
erty. Mr. Kelleher thought it was a fairy
woman, dressed in gray. “And that evening,”
he related, “when I was sitting beside the fire
with the Missus I told her about it, and the
little lad that was sitting on the dresser called
out, ‘That’s Geoffrey-a-wee that’s coming for
me,’ and he jumped down and went out of
the door and I never saw him. I thought it was
a girl I saw, but Geoffrey wouldn’t be the
name of a girl, would it? He had never spoken
before that time.”

See Also: Fairies encountered

Further Reading

Gregory, Lady, 1920. Visions and Beliefs in the West of
Ireland. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

Fossilized aliens

Writing in Flying Saucers magazine in 1970,
Buffard Ratliff, the head of a Kentucky UFO
group, reported the discovery of an extrater¬
restrial artifact: a fossilized spacecraft and its
tiny crew.

According to Ratliff, two years earlier
Melvin Gray of Louisville had been mowing
his lawn when he came upon an unusual
stone. He kept it and studied it for months,
eventually concluding that it was living proof
of a prehistoric space visit. Gray handed it over
to ufologist Ratliff, who also examined it at
length. From this examination he was able to
determine what the stone contained and what
events had precipitated its creation. It was, as
he would write, a fossilized craft containing

seven very small creatures. . . . Three ... are
ape-like in appearance. The other four are hu¬
manoid. . . . All creatures are approximately
three inches in height, are vertebrates, and have
a physical build that indicates they were very
strong for their size. . . .

The [ape] creatures died in motion as if
they were frozen in their last physical action
as they met instant death. One . . . had obvi¬
ously been critically injured and two of his
companions are trying to rescue him. . . . Two
of [the humanoids] are in a position for a
crash landing. . . . The third humanoid is sit¬
ting in what looks like a bucket seat with one
of his arms extended slightly forward and up¬
ward as though he was operating a control
lever or device to try to bring the spaceship
under control.

Ratliff contended that the crash had taken
place some four hundred million years ago.
The fossil survived and is a “permanent record
to all mankind . . . that we had tiny alien
space visitors from out there long, long ago.”
Further Reading

Ratliff, Buffard, 1970. “A Fossilized Alien Spaceship
and Its Occupants.” Flying Saucers (March): 6-7.

Fourth dimension

In occult speculation the “fourth dimension”
is a parallel universe that occupies the same
space as ours but at a different “vibrational”
level. Though its existence has never been
demonstrated scientifically, it has been used to
explain a variety of ostensibly mysterious phe¬
nomena, including disappearances in the
Bermuda Triangle, teleportation, clairvoy¬
ance, ghosts, monsters, UFOs, and more.

The concept came into the vocabulary of
occultism through Leipzig astronomer Johann
F. C. Zollner, a student of Theosophy. In the
1870s, Zollner worked with American
medium Henry Slade, who claimed the ability
to materialize or teleport objects during
seances. As Zollner saw it, such talents indi¬
cated that mediums can move things out of
our dimension into the fourth and back again.
Unfortunately for Zellner’s theory, Slade later

Fry, Daniel William 105

confessed that he produced the effects fraudu¬
lently. Later psychical researchers, however,
used variants of the fourth-dimensional idea
to explain the fate of the soul after death.

Further Reading

De Camp, L. Sprague, 1980. The Ragged Edge ofSci -
ence. Philadelphia, PA: Owlswick Press.

Layne, N. Meade, 1950. The Ether Ship and Its Solu -
tion. Vista, CA: Borderland Sciences Research
Associates.

Frank and Frances

Strolling through his rural property near Que¬
bec City, Quebec, one night in 1941, inventor
Arthur Henry Matthews encountered two
men, each six feet tall, blue-eyed, and golden¬
haired. After introducing themselves as Venu-
sians, they expressed interest in Matthews’s
work with electrical genius Nikola Tesla.
Matthews was taken to a waiting spacecraft, a
giant saucer-shaped structure called “Mother
Ship X-12,” which housed twenty-four
smaller craft as well as living quarters for crew
members. At one point, the visitors showed
Matthews the control room. Contrary to his
expectations, it was bare except for a circular
table in the middle and four “pilots,” two men
and two women, each facing one of the four
directions. The Venusians explained that the
craft flew on mental power alone. In subse¬
quent contacts, Matthews learned that one of
his hosts was the captain, who called himself
Frank. He also met Frank’s “life companion,”
introduced as Frances. Frank said the names
stood for “Truth.”

Further Reading

Bord, Janet, and Colin Bord, 1991. Life beyond

Planet Earth? Man’s Contacts with Space People.

London: GraftonBooks.

Fry, Daniel William (1908-1922)

Daniel Fry was among the leaders of the early
contactee movement. He claimed to have had
his first contact with a flying saucer—a “re¬
mote controlled cargo carrier”—in the New
Mexico desert on July 4, 1950, and to have

Daniel William Fry (Fortean Picttire Library)

boarded it for half an hour. In that time he
was whisked to and from New York, all the
while conversing with the voice of Alan, a
spaceman communicating from a mother ship
nine hundred miles from Earth. When Fry
met Alan in the flesh eleven years later, the ex¬
traterrestrial turned out to have a purely
human appearance. Intelligent and articulate,
Fry was often described by his followers as a
“scientist,” though in fact he had been no
more than a missile mechanic and technician
at the White Sands Proving Ground prior to
his contactee career. He founded Understand¬
ing, Inc., a forum for the space people’s meta¬
physical and scientific teachings. After the
1950s, when the initial excitement generated
by the first contactees had waned, Fry became
less visible, though he remained quietly active
until his death in Alamogordo, New Mexico,
in 1992.

Fry recounted his early saucer adventures
in the widely read The White Sands Incident
and Alan’s Message: To Men of Earth, both pub¬
lished in 1954. That same year, he spoke at

106 Fry, Daniel William

A UFO supposedly photographed by Daniel Fry at Merlin,
Oregon, May 1964 (Fortean Picture Library)

the First Annual Flying Saucer Convention in
Los Angeles. At a press conference, a reporter
asked him if he would take a lie-detector test
to verify his claims. When Fry agreed, a local
television station arranged a polygraph exami¬
nation. The examiner concluded that Fry was
being deceptive in his answers. Forever after,
Fry’s critics cited the allegedly failed test, as
well as a dubious Ph.D. from a London-based
diploma mill, to argue that he was no more
than a hoaxer. Still, Fry seemed to many to be
sincere about his metaphysical beliefs, perhaps
using fanciful saucer yarns as a way of attract¬
ing an audience.

See Also: Contactees

Further Reading

Fry, Daniel W., 1954. Alan’s Message: To Men of Earth.
Los Angeles: New Age Publishing Company.

-. 1954. The White Sands Incident. Los Ange¬
les: New Age Publishing Company.

-. 1954. “My Experience with the Lie Detec¬
tor.” Saucers 2, 3 (September): 6-8.

National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phe¬
nomena, 1967. Information Sheet on Daniel Fry.
Washington, DC, August.

Reeve, Bryant, and Helen Reeve, 1957'. Flying Saucer
Pilgrimage. Amherst, WI: Amherst Press.

Gabriel

In Christian and Islamic tradition, Gabriel is
one of the two mightiest angels. He is the
only angel mentioned in the Old Testament,
as the destroyer of Sodom and Gomorrah. He
is said to sit on God’s left hand and to preside
over Paradise. Mohammed credits Gabriel
with dictating the Koran to him. In more re¬
cent times, an entity named Gabriel, identify¬
ing himself as an archangel, channels through
a New York City man named Robert Baker.

Gabriel has spoken through Baker since
1990. His principal platform is the weekly
meeting of the Communion of Souls medita¬
tion group. Baker has a cable-access show,
Gabriel Speaks, on a New York television sta¬
tion every Monday afternoon. Gabriel, who
speaks of himself in the plural, says, “We
come to you at this most important time in
the evolution of your planet, a time of unity
of Soul and Spirit in the physical body
through the Light and Power of your being.
We encourage you to stand in the Power of
One, as the individual Light that you are, to
create a new vision for your world, a new
Heaven on Earth through your individual ex¬
pression of unconditional love for yourselves
and one another. We challenge you to act
upon life as creators rather than having life act
upon you” (“Gabriel Speaks,” n.d.).

Further Reading

Davidson, Gustav, 1967. A Dictionary of Angels In -
eluding the Fallen Angels. New York: Free Press.
“Gabriel Speaks,” n.d. http://childrenoflight.com/
gabriel.htm

Gef

Gef is the central character in an episode that
psychical researcher Hereward Carrington
called “preposterous”—a “palpable absurdity”—
even while conceding that it baffled him. Ac¬
cording to one of the most peculiar stories ever
told as true, Gef was a talking animal—a self-
identified mongoose—who plagued a family on
the Isle of Man between 1931 and 1938. Nu¬
merous investigators came to the site and, de¬
spite suspicions of trickery, left empty-handed.
Thirty years later, when located and inter¬
viewed, the one surviving member of the family
swore to Gef’s authenticity.

In 1931, the Irving family—father James,
mother Margaret, and twelve-year-old daugh¬
ter Viorrey—lived on a small farm known as
Doarlish Cashen (Cashen’s Gap in English)
on the Isle of Man on the Irish Sea to the
northwest of England. Facing the sea and 750
feet above it, sat their two-story stone house.
Inside, the walls were lined with dark match-
wood paneling set a few inches from the

107

108 Gef

Archangel Gabriel painted by Pietro Vannucci (Arte & Immagini srl/Corbis)

stone. This particular construction detail
would be crucial to what would follow.

One evening in September of that year, so
he would assert, James Irving heard a tapping
noise from the boarded-up attic. The next
morning, when he went into the attic, he
found a wood carving that he recognized as
his own. He had no idea how it got there, but
when he dropped it, he heard the same noise
that had sounded earlier. That evening there
were more sounds, only louder, followed by
apparent running. As Irving would tell re¬
searcher Nandor Fodor, “We heard animal

sounds: barking, growling, hissing, spitting
and blowing” (Carrington and Fodor, 1951).
Suddenly a crack shook the building so hard
that the pictures on the wall moved. Puzzled
and frightened, the family listened to gurgling
sounds that they presumed came from the un¬
known animal but which could as easily have
come from a baby learning to speak. A bark
“with a pleading note in it” came next. When
Irving made barking and meowing sounds
himself, apparently in an effort to determine
whether the animal was a dog or cat, the crea¬
ture imitated him.

Gef 109

The sounds were high-pitched and ap¬
peared to be emanating from a very small
throat.

The knockings continued for the next few
weeks. Then one day, Irving asked his wife,
“What in the name of God can he be?” From
the walls a squeaky voice echoed, “What in
the name of God can he be?” These were the
first recognizable words from Gef, as the ani¬
mal said it wanted to be called. As time
passed, Gef, whose voice was said to be two
octaves above a normal woman’s, appeared to
learn more and more words, accumulating a
vocabulary from listening to the family. He
also claimed to travel widely throughout the
island, overhearing others and learning from
them. He also brought news and gossip and
regaled family members with information
they otherwise would not have known and
sometimes did not want to know.

For his part, Gef would assert that for a
long time he had understood what people
were saying, but it was not until he took up
residence with the Irvings that he learned how
to speak words himself. When he was there,
he knew everything that went on in the
house. His favorite place, however, was in the
walls ofViorrey’s room.

Irving’s first impulse was to kill Gef, who
frightened the family with his temper and his
penchant for throwing things such as stones.
First, he tried to poison him, then to shoot
him, but, in response, Gef caused property
damage and screeched out threats. According
to Irving, Gef said, “If you are kind to me, I
will bring you good luck. If you are not kind,
I shall kill all your poultry. I can get them
wherever you put them.” The family decided
to do its best to get along with its strange
guest.

Asked who he was, Gef first identified him¬
self as a “ghost in the form of a weasel” but
later denied that he was a ghost or a polter¬
geist. He was highly temperamental, his be¬
havior unpredictable, his speech often pro¬
fane. The family left food out for him. He ate
the same food as the daughter, a detail that
skeptics would later remark on. In return, he

would provide the Irvings with dead rabbits
that would show up on the doorstep. The rab¬
bits appeared to have been strangled rather
than bitten to death.

As Gef became known and feared through¬
out the island, someone suggested that he
might be a mongoose, though at that point no
one had ever seen him. Mongooses (mammals
ordinarily found in India) are not native to
the isle, but in 1914 a local farmer had im¬
ported them to kill rabbits. When asked if he
was a mongoose, Gef said he was. At other
times, though, he boasted, “Thou wilt never
know who I am. I am a freak. I have hands,
and I have feet.” On another occasion he said,
“I am the fifth dimension. I am the eighth
wonder of the world. I can split the atom.”
Still, the idea took hold that Gef was a mon¬
goose, and he took to calling himself one.

But if eyewitness testimony is to be be¬
lieved, he could not have been a mongoose.
Those who saw him, according to investigator
Walter McGraw, “said he had a bushy tail like
a squirrel’s, yellow to brownish fur, small ears
and a pushed-in face. His most-often de¬
scribed features were his front paws, which ac¬
cording to Irving were handlike with three
fingers and a thumb” (McGraw, 1970). Mc¬
Graw adds, “he fitted the description of a
mongoose about as well as he did that of ‘part
of the fifth dimension’.” Irving estimated that
he was no more than five or six inches long
and weighed no more than a pound to a
pound and a half. Sightings of him were al¬
ways fleeting, and on rare occasion the Irvings
saw him in silhouette as a shadow in the wall.
Gef said he did not want to be seen because
he was terrified of being captured or killed. A
photograph Yiorrey took of him at a distance
of five hundred feet showed little except a
furry blur.

By early 1932, news of Gef’s doings had
spread past the isle. In a dispatch dated Janu¬
ary 10, a Manchester Daily Dispatch reporter
wrote that on a visit to Doarlish Cashen he
had heard “a voice I never imagined could
issue from a human throat,” leaving him in “a
state of considerable perplexity. . . The peo-

110 Gef

pie here at the farm . . . seem sane, honest and
responsible folk. ... I find that others, too,
have had my strange experience” (Wilkins,
1952). As the publicity spread, an American
promoter offered the family fifty thousand
dollars for the right to exhibit Gef commer¬
cially. He was refused. Other investigators
heard Gef s voice and witnessed apparent evi¬
dence of his activities, including stone-throw¬
ing and knowledge of events at a distance, but
none saw him. Others, such as psychical re¬
searcher Nandor Fodor, who spent some days
with the Irvings, could only collect testimony.
Gef tended to go into hiding when investiga¬
tors showed up. In an amusing sidelight, after
one investigator, BBC journalist R. S. Lam¬
bert, declared that Gef might well exist, a
critic called him “crazy.” Lambert took him to
court and presented a sufficiently persuasive
case that he was awarded seven thousand
pounds in damages.

Beyond anecdotal testimony, evidence of
Gef s physical existence was slight. Harry
Price, the famous “ghost hunter” who later
wrote a book on the case, saw liquid dripping
from the wall and was told that this was Gef
urinating. Hair said to be from Gef turned
out to be from a dog curiously like the Irvings’
sheepdog, Mona. The prints he allegedly al¬
lowed the Irvings to preserve in clay were not
at all like a mongoose’s or, for that matter, any
known animal’s.

Over time, so the Irvings related, Gef’s vis¬
itations became rarer and rarer. By 1938 or so
he was heard from for the last time. By then
the whole outlandish affair had fallen into ob¬
scurity. It was too much even for the most
sensationalistic newspapers; and parapsychol¬
ogists, who first took it to be an exotic polter¬
geist case, did not know what to make of it.
The only precedent for something like Gef
was a witch’s familiar (an animal form in
which witches are sometimes said to appear),
and on the Isle of Man in the 1930s, belief in
witchcraft had largely passed.

Though investigators looked carefully for
it, only one caught the Irvings in anything
that looked like suspect activity. From the be¬

ginning, skeptics wondered if “Gef’ weren’t a
fiction created by skilled ventriloquism. Early
in the course of the episode, a reporter for the
Isle of Man Examiner thought he caught Vior-
rey making a squeaking sound, though her fa¬
ther insisted the sound was coming from the
other side of the room. Aside from this am¬
biguous episode, investigators on site ex¬
pressed doubts that so complex a hoax could
be accomplished so simply, even if it were
physically possible, which struck them as al¬
most out of the question. Locally, the Irvings
were regarded as reliable, honest people. If
they were hoaxers, their motives were clearly
not financial. They made practically no
money from their participation in the matter.

The Irvings eventually moved away from
Doarlish Cashen and dropped into obscurity.

Skeptical theories have focused on Vior-
rey’s role. In 1983, Melvin Harris speculated
that she had first tricked her parents with
ventriloquism. Later, even after they realized
that they had been fooled, her parents got
caught up in the hoax and played along with
it. Harris writes, “Gef never had a personality
or existence independent of Yiorrey. He
brought home rabbits, as did Yiorrey. His fa¬
vorite foods were also Viorrey’s favorites. He
shared her strong interests in mechanical
things.”

In the late 1960s, after thirty years of si¬
lence, Viorrey was located and interviewed
somewhere in England (she insisted that her
place of residence be kept confidential). She
told Walter McGraw that she despised Gef,
who she thought had ruined her life. She said
that he had caused her pain and embarrass¬
ment, and, even at the time, she and her
mother had hated the publicity. “It was not a
hoax,” she said, “and I wish it had never hap¬
pened. . . . We were snubbed. ... I had to
leave the Isle of Man, and I hope that no one
where I work now ever knows the story. Gef
has even kept me from getting married. How
could I ever tell a man’s family about what
happened?” She complained bitterly that Gef
“made me meet people I didn’t want to meet.
Then they said I was ‘mental’ or a ventrilo-

Gordon 111

quist. Believe me, if I was that good I would
jolly well be making money from it now!”
(McGraw, 1970).

Further Reading

Carrington, Hereward, and Nandor Fodor, 1951.
Haunted People: Story of the Poltergeist down the
Centuries. New York: E. E Dutton and Company.
Harris, Melvin, 1983. “The Mongoose That Talked
and Lost for Words.” In Peter Brookesmith, ed.
Open Files, 19—27. London: Orbis Publishing.
McGraw, Walter, 1970. “Gef—The Talking Mon¬
goose ... 30 Years Later.” Fate 23, 7 (July):
74-82.

Wilkins, Harold T„ 1952. “History of the Talking
Mongoose.” Fate 5, 4 (June): 58-69.

Germane

Germane channels through Lyssa Royal. “He”
is neither male nor female, and he does not
have a name; Germane is simply an identifica¬
tion of convenience. He is from “a realm of
integration that does not have a clear-cut den¬
sity/dimensional level.” He is not even an en¬
tity as such but a kind of personification of a
group-consciousness energy. In the distant fu¬
ture, once human beings have been fully inte¬
grated spiritually, physically, emotionally, and
mentally, they will be like him.

See Also: Channeling

Further Reading

“ET Civilizations—Germane,” 1994. http://www.
lemuria.net/article-et-civilizations.html

Goblin Universe

Goblin Universe is a kind of catchall phrase
some people use to characterize the realm of
fantastic but, according to some, real entities
and creatures that seem out of place in our or¬
dinary understanding of reality. The Goblin
Universe is said to house everything from
demons and fairies to ghosts, humanoids, and
monstrous beasts. It is an explicitly paranor¬
mal or occult concept, rejected by some
anomalists who insist that the objects of their
investigations—whether UFOs or unknown
animals such as Sasquatch or the Loch Ness
monster—are simply so far undocumented as¬
pects of this universe or planet.

To its proponents, however, the Goblin
Universe is a deeply mysterious, elusive place.
The late F. W. Holiday called it “a hall of dis¬
torting mirrors. ... It will not be ignored. Pol¬
tergeists often throw objects at utter skeptics.
Members of the Phantom Menagerie appear
in front of bored cops who want only to scrib¬
ble their daily reports and go home. UFOs
swoop over cities like Washington, Rome and
London to thumb their noses at bureau¬
crats. . . . Like it or lump it, we are all in that
damned Hall of Mirrors” (Holiday, 1986).

See Also: Fairies encountered

Further Reading

Holiday, F. W, 1986. The Goblin Universe. St. Paul,
MN: Llewellyn Publications.

Gordon

“Gordon” is the name of an ostensible extra¬
terrestrial whom two Alaska women claim to
have encountered while traveling through
western Canada in October 1974. Their story
amounts to a UFO-age variant of the venera¬
ble legend of the “vanishing hitchhiker.”

Edmoana Toews of Anchorage and her
friend Nuria Hanson were returning from a
convention of the Coptic Christian Fellowship
of America in Kalamazoo, Michigan. On Oc¬
tober 18, they were driving on the summit of
Steamboat Mountain in British Columbia
when they spotted two lights. One, three times
the apparent size of the moon, approached
them, then shot away to hover in the sky. The
other light resting on the mountainside,
looked, on closer examination, like a derby hat
with portholes. The two women pulled into an
abandoned driveway and watched the two ob¬
jects for forty-five minutes. At one point, the
landed UFO rose and flew one hundred to one
hundred fifty feet before resettling on the
ground. During the sighting, a truck stopped,
and the driver emerged to look at the UFOs,
but the women would not approach—one of a
number of actions (or inactions) they were
later unable to understand.

When they resumed their journey along an
icy, fog-covered highway, something seemed

112 Gray Face

to take control of the car, even managing
curves perfectly. But no matter what Toews
did, the vehicle traveled at no more than
twenty-five miles per hour. She and her friend
also became aware of a bright light shining
through the mist. It was coming from a white
cloud twenty to thirty feet above them. As
their trip went on, Toews was shocked to see
that no matter how far they went, the gas
gauge did not move.

Late that night, they stopped at a lodge at
Muncho Lake. It was closed, but they got out
of their car to stretch their legs. A young man,
dark-haired and bearded, stepped out of the
darkness. Though the temperature was barely
above zero, the man was dressed only in shirt,
pants, and shoes. The car was packed, and the
women insisted there was no room for him,
but he still persuaded them to drive him to
the next lodge, some eighty miles away, where
he said he worked. The space was so cramped
that he had to sit on Hansons lap. Strangely,
she could feel no weight. When she remarked
on it, he responded humorously but vaguely.

Toews asked his name. He leaned toward
her and stared into her eyes before saying,
“Gordon.” Both women thought he looked
familiar, but neither could place him. He was
pleasant and friendly in his manner. After the
UFO reappeared above trees along the high¬
way, Gordon inquired about their views of life
in the universe and of angels. In time, Toews
understood why Gordon didn’t seem to weigh
anything: he was hovering about two inches
in the air. She even covertly ran her hand
under him to make sure.

When they stopped for the night at an inn
in northern British Columbia, Gordon sud¬
denly was no longer there. The women looked
and called for him, but he had not even left
tracks in the snow. They were sure that he had
stepped out of the car with them and that he
couldn’t have been out of their sight for more
than a few seconds.

The inn was closed, so they stayed in the
lounge with a truck driver, who refused to be¬
lieve that they could have come all the way
from Steamboat Mountain—one hundred

sixty-five miles away—under existing road
and weather conditions. The strangeness of
their situation did not hit them until the next
night, when they were staying at another
lodge. Toews suddenly realized that Gordon
reminded her of her husband, Jim, who had
the same hair color, eyes, mannerism, body
shape. And her husband’s middle name was
Gordon.

The following morning they set off. At first
conditions were good, but soon a storm came
down. Weirdly, though, the road ahead of
them remained dry, even as snow fell and
swirled on either side. They looked up to see
the mysterious cloud they had observed ear¬
lier. Later, their car engine failed, and two
mysterious men who seemed to know things
about the women that strangers could not
have known helped them restart it. The cloud
left only as Toews’s car got to Anchorage and
four blocks away from her house.

The women came to believe that Gordon
was either a spaceman or an angel. Eventually,
Joseph J. Brewer, Judge of the District Court
in Anchorage, heard of their experience and
interviewed them. He and Toews wrote an ac¬
count of it in Fate, a popular magazine on the
paranormal and occult.

Further Reading

Toews, Edmoana, with Joseph J. Brewer, 1977. “The
UFOs That Led Us Home.” Fate Pt. I. 30, 6
(June): 38-45; Pt. II. 30, 7 (July): 63-65, 68-69.

Gray Face

“Gray Face” was the name Clyde Preston, a
North Carolina truck driver, gave to one of a
number of extraterrestrials who visited him
over a nearly two-decade-long period. In
1993, under hypnosis, Preston recalled being
abducted into a UFO in the course of a (con¬
sciously remembered) close encounter with a
UFO while he was on a run to South Dakota.
While aboard the UFO, he encountered a hu¬
manoid being he calls “Gray Face.”

Even before the abduction memories sur¬
faced, however, Preston underwent a series of
strange experiences that he believed were tied

Great Mother 113

to his close encounter. He suffered serious mi¬
graine headaches in the wake of that sighting.
They left only after he discussed his encounter
with a ufologist. Soon afterward, he developed
psychic abilities that would come and go errat¬
ically. They so disrupted his life that his wife,
fearing he had lost his sanity, left him. He un¬
derwent out-of-body episodes and found him¬
self doing automatic writing at a furious pace.
These writings covered many subjects, from
Earth’s ancient history to future geological cat¬
aclysms. Much of the material had to do with
the Bible. The writing claimed that the Ten
Commandments were a kind of universal code
that must be deciphered, then obeyed.

One night in 1993, Preston awoke and
spotted a beam of light going through his
chest. He felt intense pain, then had the sen¬
sation that he was being pulled out of his
body. Two shadowy beings, reeking of evil and
menace, had him by the arms and were forc¬
ing him to a black abyss. This abyss, he
thought, was the entrance to hell. He began to
pray, and the next thing he knew, a beautiful
blue sky surrounded him. A soothing light,
emanating apparently from God, gave him a
feeling of peace and ecstasy. Though he did
not wish to return to his body, something told
him that he must do so, and he did. He lay
awake the rest of the night reflecting on all
that had happened to him, and in the morn¬
ing he vowed to find a hypnotist who could
help him fill in the gaps in his memory.

While hypnotized, he recounted the 1977
abduction as well as others. These abductions
occurred in a foggy, dreamlike environment.
Besides Gray Face, there was White Face,
which looked like a carving of an Egyptian
deity. Another entity, this one especially
frightening, wore a mask with a face like a
Mayan or Aztec god. A week after the hypno¬
sis session, this being appeared in Preston’s
bedroom and removed the mask. Preston was
somewhat relieved to see that it resembled
Gray Face with slightly heavier features.

In each case, telepathic contact occurred,
but it was always one-sided, coming from the
aliens to Preston.

He also had two encounters, only an hour
apart, with Mr. Brown Robe, as he called a fig¬
ure clad in such a garment. It had no facial fea¬
tures, but it was able to communicate men¬
tally. It stressed the importance of Matthew 24
in the New Testament, the chapter in which
Jesus discusses the events that will take place
just prior to the Second Coming. Preston no¬
ticed that Mr. Brown Robe, Gray Face, and
the others never used the word “God” but did
talk of a “universal intelligence.” Still, he
linked his visitors with Bible figures. He be¬
lieved Brown Robe, for example, to be a kind
of angel, Gray Face a “Watcher” from the Old
Testament’s Daniel 4.

Preston’s last abduction occurred one night
in 1995 when a group of gray-skinned, large¬
eyed humanoids—the classic “grays” of ab¬
duction lore—took him into a UFO, where
he was subjected to an apparent medical ex¬
amination. On his return at 2:50 A.M., he
heard a mechanical voice speaking to him. It
said that the world’s governments not only
knew about the presence of extraterrestrials
but also had contact with them. The aliens
warned the governments about the dangers of
nuclear testing and environmental destruc¬
tion. By their blundering, humans had un¬
knowingly caused trouble with forces beyond
their comprehension. One consequence was
that Earth’s magnetism had been altered.

Preston’s contacts ended with that experi¬
ence. In retrospect, he concluded that the
aliens had not always told him the straight
truth, that much of what they told him was
not strictly accurate. He thought that some
had been agents of Satan, while others, such
as Gray Face and Mr. Brown Robe, had be¬
nign intentions.

See Also: Abductions by UFOs

Further Reading

Davis, Carolyn, 1998. “The UFO Messenger.” Fate
51, 11 (November): 22-24.

Great Mother

In Escape from Destruction (1955), which was
later reprinted as Escape to the Inner Earth,

114 Great White Brotherhood

Raymond Bernard—the pseudonym of Wal¬
ter Siegmeister—wrote of his association with
a Puerto Rican psychic known as Mayita,
“whose body functions as an interplanetary
radio.” From extraterrestrial sources, Mayita
learned that an atomic war would erupt on
Earth between 1965 and 1970 and that by
2000, the planet’s surface would be devoid of
any kind of life. Those few humans of suffi¬
ciently pure body and spirit would be lifted
from Earth and flown by flying saucers to a
safe haven on Mars. Mayita’s principal contact
was the Great Mother, who lived on the
sun—not, she informed the psychic, the un-
endurably hot star we believe it to be. The
Great Mother, described as having a beautiful
face, long golden hair, and deep blue eyes, re¬
lated to her the story of humankind’s secret
past.

One hundred fifty thousand years ago, the
Great Mother, then living on Uranus, gave
birth, via parthenogenesis (self-fertilization),
to the first members of a race of superwomen.
For the next fifty thousand years they lived in
a utopian society. That ended when a mutant
named Lucifer came into the world. Lucifer
was a “defective . . . sterile female”—a man, in
other words. Filled with resentment, he even¬
tually convinced himself of his superiority.
Using electromagnetic waves (sexual inter¬
course did not yet exist), he persuaded some
of his sisters to let him impregnate them so
that they would give birth to males as well as
females. Outraged that more mutants were
being brought into the world, the Great
Mother exiled Lucifer, his wives, and their
children to Saturn. On that planet, Lucifer
changed his name to Satan and used his male
aggressiveness and propensity for anger and
violence to institute harsh rule. His children
thrived, however. After another fifty thousand
years Lucifer/Satan turned his eyes on the one
planet the Great Mother’s daughters had yet
to colonize: the Earth.

A fleet of spaceships landed on Earth, and
Satan’s reign began. Many of the immigrants
from Saturn settled in Lemuria and Atlantis,
finally destroying them both in the course of

nuclear conflict. After that, the human race’s
degeneration went on at an alarming pace.
War, cruelty, and suffering have continued
unabated over many centuries. Earth’s male
and female inhabitants commit the great
abomination of meat-eating, and they also en¬
gage in the loathsome practice of sexual inter¬
course. Men dominate women, even though
the latter are superior to the former, because
of sexual desire and painful, nonpartheno-
genetic birth. Even when they think they are
worshipping God, they are worshipping
Satan.

Only those human beings who abstain
from sex, meat, caffeine, alcohol, and tobacco
can hope to restore moral and intellectual
order to their existence. Flying saucers will
rescue them at the last moment. On their ar¬
rival on Mars, men and women will be sepa¬
rated and will live chaste, segregated lives. In
this new paradise, they will go beyond vege¬
tarianism and learn to subsist on air and the
perfume of certain flowers.

In his book, Bernard urged readers to come
to San Francisco Island, off the coast of Brazil,
where he had gone to establish a utopian
colony. Coincidentally or otherwise, Mayita
was preaching a doctrine Bernard had advo¬
cated for the previous two decades. In it, sex¬
ual intercourse is vile and unclean, women are
superior, and men are a dangerous mutation.
Critic Walter Kafton-Minkel observes that
this “story of our origins sounds much like a
mythology devised by a community of mod¬
ern radical feminists” (Kafton-Minkel, 1989).

See Also: Atlantis; Lemuria

Further Reading

Bernard, Raymond [pseud, of Walter Siegmeister],
1974. Escape to the Inner Earth. Clarksburg, WV:
Saucerian Press.

Kafton-Minkel, Walter, 1989. Subterranean Worlds:
100,000 Years of Dragons, Dwarfs, the Dead, Lost
Races and UFOs from inside the Earth. Port
Townsend, WA: Loompanics Unlimited.

Great White Brotherhood

The Great White Brotherhood figures in such
schools of occultism as Theosophy and Rosi-

Grim Reaper 115

crucianism. The Brotherhood is thought to
consist of ascended masters who oversee the
spiritual and physical evolution of the human
race.

Greater Nibiruan Council

The Greater Nibiruan Council (GNC) is de¬
scribed as the “main governing arm of the
Galactic Federation,” comprising the smaller
Nibiruan Councils (NC) in the various di¬
mensions of the universe. The GNC’s respon¬
sibilities are many. It sponsors emissaries and
ambassadors from the many planetary civiliza¬
tions and provides courts and oversight for
disputes. It also gives military protection to
threatened peoples and trains races for mem¬
bership in the federation.

On an even larger scale the GNC oversees
the divine evolution of each planet and every
individual soul in the galaxy. It works with
every level of the spiritual hierarchy to ensure
that all work effectively together. It maintains
the galactic structure and interacts with other
galactic federations. These are only a few of its
many tasks, conducted with the assistance of
innumerable smaller, dimensional councils.
The oldest of these is the 9D Nibiruan Coun¬
cil, also known as “The Ancient Ones” and
the “Pelegians.” This council is headed by
Devin and his half-brother Jehowah, members
of the two royal houses of Ain and Avyon.

In the human dimension—the third—the
3D Nibiruan Council (3DNC) began in
Kansas City, Missouri, in January 1997,
under the direction of channeler Jelaila Starr
and associates Terry Spears and Dermot
Kerin. A year and a half later, it relocated to
Los Angeles. Starr is its sole owner, and the
council functions as a tax-paying small busi¬
ness. According to Starr, the 3DNC repre¬
sents the GNC on Earth and upholds its di¬
rectives as they apply to this world. Other
responsibilities include “providing the 9D
Tools of Integration to the people of Earth
along with support and training for using
them in the form of books, tapes, videos,
workshops, seminars, etc.; providing a living

example of the Ascension Tools in action
through their actions; relaying messages in the
form of updates and perspectives to the peo¬
ple of Earth for the purpose of education,
support and enlightenment; supporting the
work of other groups and individuals involved
in the ascension of earth and its people” (“The
Greater Nibiruan Council Section,” 2000).

The concept of “Nibirua” comes from the
writings of ancient-astronaut theorist Zecha-
ria Sitchin, from his reading of ancient
Sumerian literature. Sitchin, however, believes
Nibirua to be an inhabited but undetected
planet in our solar system. Its people, who
have an extraordinarily advanced technology,
created the human race in their image using
genetic engineering. Nibirua orbits Earth
every thirty-six hundred years. In Sitchin’s as¬
sessment, the planet is due to pass between
Mars and Jupiter in the near future, and the
Nibiruans—known as the Annunaki—will
visit us again.

Further Reading

“The Greater Nibiruan Council Section,” 2000.
http://www.nibiruancouncil.com/html/greater_
nibiruan_council_secti.html

Sitchin, Zecharia, 1976. The Twelfth Planet. New
York: Stein and Day.

Grim Reaper

The folkloric figure of the Grim Reaper is al¬
most universally assumed to be wholly imagi¬
nary and symbolic. Anomalist Mark Chorvin-
sky, however, insists that apparently sincere,
sane persons have seen, in death or near-death
contexts, apparitional forms that match in
most or all particulars the robed, skeletal fig¬
ure. Chorvinsky has collected a number of re¬
ports and published some representative ac¬
counts in his Strange Magazine.

One case came from a retired nurse who
years earlier had worked at a hospital in Hous¬
ton. While running down the hallway on a
very hot day on her way to replacing another
nurse on duty, she passed a room and glanced
inside. She walked on past five other rooms
before what she had seen sank in and she re¬
turned to look more carefully. An old woman

116 Grim Reaper

The Vision of Death, an image of the Grim Reaper in an engraving by Gustave Dore (Fortean Picture Library)

lay in a bed while beside it stood a tall figure “His face was a skull with tiny red fires for

in a monk’s robe, its head covered. Apparently eyes. His hands, skeletal, were patiently folded

aware of the nurse’s presence, the figure over each other inside the dark sleeves. My

turned to look at her. She told Chorvinsky, impression was [that] he was very patient,

Gyeorgos Ceres Hatonn 117

waiting” (Chorvinsky, 1997). A terrible death
smell, like something rotting in the sun, hung
in the air.

The nurse felt a literal freezing sensation
when the figure stared at her. She quickly re¬
treated. By the time she got to her original
destination, the male nurse on duty saw that
she was cold. He wrapped her in blankets and
gave her hot chocolate. It was two hours,
however, before she felt herself able to speak
about what she had seen.

Another retired nurse claimed to have
seen the Grim Reaper on a number of occa¬
sions. “Usually,” she said, “I just see a dark
figure, robed, standing near the nurses’ sta¬
tion, or perhaps in the hall. Very rarely, the
figure will be white. I’ve never heard it speak,
but someone always dies within a few days of
its appearance.”

A man identified only as A. L. told a story
with a different ending. Late one evening in
1974, he was sitting in his Yonkers, New
York, apartment while his three children slept
in their rooms. His wife was in their bath¬
room. When he happened to glance to his
right, he was startled to observe a black-
hooded figure holding a scythe, its face a lu¬
minous white skull. It was staring at him as it
glided slowly backward and disappeared
through the door. Fearing that the Reaper had
come for someone, A. L. banged on the bath¬
room door. When he got no response, he en¬
tered and found his wife lying on the floor
next to an empty bottle of pills. With the as¬
sistance of his sister and her husband, who
lived close by, he was able to revive his wife
and take her to the hospital. “The encounter
has left me with the feeling that the Reaper is
a special friend,” he told Chorvinsky. “He ap¬
peared to me and gave warning instead of tak¬
ing someone.”

Someone else claimed that the Grim Reaper
saved his life when he was eight years old.
Dennis Wardrop was skating on a pond when
the ice gave way under his feet, and he
plunged into the frigid water. He tried desper¬
ately to find a way out as his lungs filled with
the water. He felt something poking him and

grabbed onto it as it lifted him to safety. After
he wiped the water from his eyes, he was terri¬
fied to learn that he was holding the blunt end
of a long scythe in the hands of a tall, large fig¬
ure with the face of a decomposing corpse. It
wore a black robe and a hood over its head. In¬
side the eye sockets were “swirling whirlpools
of black and dimly glowing reds.” An “odor of
death” permeated the air. Perhaps sensing his
fear, the figure assured him (whether telepathi-
cally or orally is not explained) that he would
be okay, that it was not yet his time. The boy
collapsed from exhaustion. When he revived
soon thereafter, the figure was gone, and he
felt curiously warm even though it was only
fourteen degrees above zero.

Chorvinsky writes, “I have investigated
particularly intriguing cases in which the
Reaper has been seen by multiple witnesses.
And ... I know of incidents in which the
Reaper was reported to have actually healed
injuries and assisted the ill and the dying.”

Further Reading

Chorvinsky, Mark, 1997. “Encounters with the
Grim Reaper.” Strange Magazine 18 (Summer):
6 - 12 .

Gyeorgos Ceres Hatonn

Gyeorgos Ceres Hatonn—usually addressed
and referred to simply as Hatonn—speaks
through Doris Ekker (known as Dharma).
George and Desiree Green and others associ¬
ated with the Phoenix Project distribute Ha-
tonn’s messages through a magazine called the
Phoenix Journal. Hatonn describes himself as
“Commander in Chief, Earth Project Transi¬
tion, Pleiades Sector Flight command, Inter-
galactic Federation Fleet-Ashtar Command;
Earth Representative to the Cosmic Council
and Intergalactic Federation Council on Earth
Transition” (“Who Is Hatonn?”).

Hatonn denies that the process through
which he communicates is channeling. It is,
he says, more like radio transmission directly
from spaceship to contactee. “We travel and
act,” he says, “in the direct service and under
Command of Esu Jesus Immanuel Sananda.

118 Gyeorgos Ceres Hatonn

Sananda is aboard my Command Craft from
whence He will direct all evacuation and tran¬
sition activities as regards the period you ones
call the End Prophecies of Armageddon.”

In contrast to the benign words of most oth¬
erworldly beings who speak through con-
tactees, Hatonn and his fellows preach a
fiercely expressed conspiracy theory with
openly anti-Semitic elements. For example:
“Anarchy is something that the Jew promotes
relentlessly. While in complete control of the fi¬
nancial powers of the state, they promote in¬
ternecine strife” (Ecker, 1992). Hatonn also de¬
nies that the Holocaust ever occurred. Hatonn
refers to Jews who are working with the anti-

Christ, Satan, and the “evil leaders” of the New
World Order to control the world. The plotters
call it Plan 2000. The space people and their
earthly allies such as those in the Phoenix Proj¬
ect are working to thwart the conspiracy and to
create a new Earth after wars and natural disas¬
ters have reshaped the face of the planet.

See Also: Ashtar; Channeling; Contactees; Sananda

Further Reading

Ecker, Don, 1992. “Hatonn’s World.” UFO 7, 4
(July/August): 30-31.

Heard, Alex, 1999. Apocalypse Pretty Soon: Travels in
End-Time America. New York: W. W. Norton and
Company.

“Who Is Hatonn?” http://www.fourwindslO.com/
information.html

Hierarchal Board

The Hierarchal Board communicates through
Pauline Sharpe (also known as Nada-Yolanda)
via channeling and automatic writing. The
board is the solar systems spiritual govern¬
ment, and its members include Sananda
(Jesus), who has orbited Earth in a spacecraft
since 1885. Right now he is in etheric form
but will enter the physical realm as the planet
is cleansed and transformed for the coming
New Age, due to arrive sometime around
2000. Sharpe’s organization is called Mark-
Age, “commissioned by the Hierarchal Board
to implant a prototype of spiritual govern¬
ment on Earth, the I Am Nation. The I Am
Nation is a government of, for and by the I
Am Selves of all people on Earth. ... It is not
a political government, but is a spiritual con¬
gregation of all souls who seek to serve God,
first and foremost, and the I Am Selves of all
people on Earth” (Mark Age,” n.d.).

Mark-Age came into being in I960,
though communications from the board had
begun four years earlier through Charles Boyd
Gentzel. Over the years, several persons re¬
ceived the messages, but in time Sharpe be¬
came the organization’s guiding personality. It
has published a large amount of channeled
material, including communications from
Gloria Lee, a 1950s-era contactee.

See Also: Channeling; Contactees; J. W.; Sananda

Further Reading

“Mark-Age: Love in Action for the New Age.”
http://www.islandnet.com/-arton/markage.html

One Thousand Keys to the Truth, 1976. Miami, FL:
Mark-Age MetaCenter.

Holloman aliens

A modern legend, widely circulated but never
verified, holds that aliens once landed at Hol¬
loman Air Force Base in New Mexico and
conferred with representatives of the govern¬
ment and military. The event is variously set
on April 1964 or May 1971.

The story emerged under curious circum¬
stances. Robert Emenegger and Allan Sandler,
two wealthy Los Angeles businessmen, had
gone to Norton Air Force Base in California
where they were to discuss the production of a
documentary film dealing with advanced re¬
search projects. The discussion soon expanded
to include other possible subjects, one dealing
with the air force and UFOs. Emenegger and
Sandler expressed interest in the UFO project,
and their contacts—the head of the base’s
U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations
(AFOSI) and audio-visual director Paul Shar-
tle—began laying plans. They told the civil¬
ians that in May 1971 cameras at Holloman
AFB had recorded an extraordinary event. A

119

120 Holloman aliens

A government employee photographed a possible UFO as it hoveredfor fifteen minutes near Holloman Air Force Base, New
Mexico. (Bettmann/Corbis)

flying saucer had landed at the base, and three
beings had stepped outside.

Shartle, who claimed to have seen this
16mm film, said on national television in Oc¬
tober 1988 that the beings were the size of hu¬
mans but had gray complexions and large
noses. They wore tight-fitting suits and “thin
headdresses that appeared to be communica¬
tion devices, and in their hands they held a
translator’” (Howe, 1989). The Holloman
commander and other officers had met with
the aliens over the next several days.

Emenegger claims to have been taken to
Holloman and shown the buildings where the
saucer was stored and the meetings con¬
ducted. He and Sandler were promised thirty-
two hundred feet of the landing film, but they
never saw it because permission to view it,
much less reproduce it, was subsequently
withdrawn. They went on to make a UFO
documentary, and Emenegger wrote a paper¬
back based on it. In it he mentions the Hollo¬
man incident but not as something that had
actually happened, merely as something that

could happen in the future. In a section of
photographs and illustrations, however, there
is a drawing clearly intended to be a Hollo¬
man alien, said only to be “based on eyewit¬
ness descriptions” (Emenegger, 1974).

In 1982, Colorado-based ufologist and
documentary filmmaker Linda Moulton
Howe met with Sergeant Richard Doty, an
AFOSI agent, at Kirtland Air Force Base in
New Mexico. Asked about the Holloman in¬
cident, Doty asserted that it had indeed oc¬
curred but on April 25, 1964, seven years ear¬
lier than Emenegger had been led to believe.
Doty showed her a document that purported
to detail the U.S. government’s interaction
with aliens and its recovery of extraterrestrial
wreckage and bodies. He mentioned films,
one of them taken at Holloman. Despite re¬
peated promises, Doty never produced any
film or other documentation for Howe. He
later emerged as a suspect in a notorious,
forged paper concerning a secret group, Ma-
jestic-12, which supposedly studies alien re¬
mains and supervises the cover-up.

Hollow earth 121

In the 1980s, the legend grew as a right-
wing conspiracy theorist named Milton
William Cooper claimed to have seen super¬
secret documents attesting to an agreement
between the U.S. government and malevolent
aliens. According to Cooper, the first Hollo¬
man meeting happened in 1954. Officials and
aliens agreed that in exchange for the freedom
to abduct humans without interference, the
extraterrestrials (from a dying planet that or¬
bits Betelgeuse) would provide the govern¬
ment with advanced technology, so long as it
kept silent about it. Subsequently, Cooper
would write in a wild book allegedly docu¬
menting the sinister machinations of the “se¬
cret government” that the agreement broke
down; according to Cooper, aliens and gov¬
ernment entered into conflict over who would
get to control and manipulate the human
race. Among other bizarre allegations, Cooper
stated that President Kennedy was assassi¬

nated because he planned to expose the
scheme to the American people.

Further Reading

Brookesmith, Peter, 1996. UFO: The Government
Files. New York: Barnes and Noble Books.

Cooper, Milton William, 1991. Behold a Pale Horse.

Sedona, AZ: Light Technology Publishing.
Emenegger, Robert, 1974. UFOs Past, Present and
Future. New York: Ballantine Books.

Howe, Linda Moulton, 1989. An Alien Harvest: Fur -
ther Evidence Linking Animal Mutilations and
Human Abductions to Alien Life Forms. Littleton,
CO: Linda Moulton Howe Productions.

Jones, William E., and Rebecca D. Minshall, 1991.
Bill Cooper and the Need for More Research (UFOs,
Conspiracies, and the JFK Assassination). Dublin,
OH: MidOhio Research Associates.

Hollow earth

A long mythological tradition holds that su¬
pernatural beings dwell beneath our feet, ei¬
ther in caves and caverns or in the earths inte-

Books on the holloiu-earth theory (Fortean Picture Library)

122 Hollow earth

rior. Some beliefs have it that the spirits of the
unsaved dead live on in gloom or torment be¬
neath our feet. The most famous scientific
proponent of a hollow earth, Edmond Halley
(1656-1743), best remembered for the comet
named after him, argued that within the
earths sphere there were three other, smaller
ones, all harboring intelligent beings. Theories
about a hollow earth, while dismissed as phys¬
ically impossible by scientists, continue on the
fringes into modern times.

John Cleeves Symmes (1779-1829) be¬
came a notorious figure in early American his¬
tory as a vigorous publicist for the notion first
proposed by Halley, of an earth whose interior
consisted of concentric spheres. According to
Symmes, the interior could be entered
through four-thousand-mile-wide holes at ei¬
ther pole. Symmes hoped to lead an expedi¬
tion into the earth, and he lectured widely, all
the while lobbying for funding. In the face of
national ridicule, he argued that the people of
the interior amounted to a vast new market
for American goods. Symmes inspired Edgar
Allan Poe to write the classic proto-science-
fiction novella The Narrative of Arthur Gordon
Pym (1838). Symmes’s son Americus kept the
faith after his father had passed on. As late as
1878 he published a collection of the elder
Symmes’s writings and lectures.

The 1870s and 1880s saw a hollow-earth
revival with the publication of still other books
championing the notion, including M. L.
Sherman’s The Hollow Globe (1871), a chan¬
neled work, and Frederick Culmer’s The Inner
World (1886). Helena Blavatsky incorporated
the hollow earth into her two popular and in¬
fluential occult texts Isis Unveiled (1877) and
The Secret Doctrine (1888). Another important
book, William Reed’s The Phantom of the Poles,
was published in 1906, the first of a small li¬
brary of hollow-earth volumes to be issued
through the twentieth century.

By the late nineteenth century, a religion
based on the hollow earth was formed by Cyrus
Teed (1839-1908), after a vision in which the
Mother of the Universe told him he would save
the world. He went on to lead a utopian com-

An illustration of the hollow earth from Phantoms of the
Poles by William Reed, 1906 (Fortean Picture Library)

munity in Fort Myers, Florida, devoted to “Ko-
reshanity.” Koreshanity held that not only is the
earth hollow, humans live inside it, orbiting the
sun, which is at the center of the world. The
stars, planets, and moon are also within the
earth’s shell. Marshall B. Gardner’s book A Jour -
ney to the Earth’s Interior (1913) agreed with
Teed’s views to the extent that Gardner was will¬
ing to acknowledge an interior sun, though it
was not the sun, and another race, not humans,
get their heat and light from it. This other-race
lives in a pleasant, tropical climate.

Other fringe thinkers, notably H. Spencer
Fewis and Guy Warren Ballard, wrote that
Mount Shasta in northern California is an en¬
trance to the interior, where a colony of sur¬
vivors from the lost continent Femuria live
on. Ballard claimed to have personally met
super beings under the mountain, including
golden-haired, angelic Yenusians such as those
George Adamski and later flying-saucer con-
tactees would claim to know. Ballard, his wife
Edna, and their son Donald founded a popu¬
lar Theosophy-based (and fascist) movement
around these experiences and doctrines. Bal¬
lard died in 1939, but his organization, the “I
AM” still exists.

In the 1940s the pages of the science-fic¬
tion pulps Amazing Stories and Fantastic Ad -

Honor 123

ventures carried the allegedly true, intensely
controversial experiences of Richard S. Shaver
Shaver asserted that he had been inside vast
subterranean caverns, where remnants of an
advanced race that had once populated the
surface still lived. There were two groups, the
deros—sadistic idiots who used the ancients’
advanced technology to harm surface-
dwellers—and the teros—the embattled mi¬
nority of good guys who tried, mostly without
success, to stop the deros’ schemes.

When flying saucers and UFOs entered
popular consciousness in the years after World
War II, inevitably, speculation tied them to
inner-earthers. Flying Saucers, a magazine ed¬
ited by Ray Palmer, who, as editor of Amaz -
ing, had championed what he called the
Shaver mystery, brought the concept of holes
in the poles and the notion of hollow earth
into its pages. Perhaps the most widely read
book in the literature, The Hollow Earth
(1964) by Raymond Bernard (the pseudonym
of Walter Siegmeister, a man with a decades-
long association with fringe beliefs), stated
that flying saucers come in and out the pole
holes. The Canadian neo-Nazi Ernst Zundel,
writing as Christof Friedrich, contributed the
book UFOs—Nazi Secret Weapons (1976),
which alleged that Hitler and his Last Battal¬
ion had fled to Argentina, then to Antarctica.
From there they entered the earth and dedi¬
cated their energies to the construction of an
advanced technology. Nazi technology is re¬
sponsible for what we call UFOs. Zundel—
and later the Missouri-based International So¬
ciety for a Complete Earth—tried to raise
funds to fly through the hole in the pole in ve¬
hicles prominently displaying swastikas to en¬
sure that they got a friendly reception.

Some, though not all, current hollow-earth
advocacy is tied to explicit or implicit pro-
Nazi sympathies. For example, Norma Cox’s
virulently anti-Semitic Kingdoms within Earth
(1985) blamed an international Zionist con¬
spiracy for suppressing the truth about a hol¬
low globe; she also openly praised Hitler. A
more benign, good-humored approach to the
subject of a hollow earth can be found in

Dennis G. Crenshaw’s occasional periodical
The Hollow Earth Insider.

See Also: Adamski, George; Contactees; King Leo;
Lemuria; Mount Shasta; Rainbow City; Shaver
mystery

Further Reading

Beckley, Timothy G reen, ed., 1993. The Smoky God
and Other Inner Earth Mysteries. New Brunswick,
NJ: Inner Light Publications.

Bernard, Raymond [pseud, of Walter Siegmeister],
1964. The Hollow Earth: The Greatest Geographi -
cal Discovery in History. New York: Fieldcrest
Publishing.

Cox, Norma, 1985. Kingdoms within Earth. Mar¬
shall, AR: self-published.

Crabb, Riley, 1960. The Reality of the Underground.
Vista, CA: Borderland Sciences Research Associ¬
ates.

Fitch, Theodore, 1960. Our Paradise inside the Earth.

Council Bluffs, IA: self-published.

Friedrich, Christof [pseud, of Ernest Zundel], 1976.
UFOs—Nazi Secret Weapons? Toronto, Ontario:
Samisdat.

-, 1978. Secret Nazi Polar Expeditions.

Toronto, Ontario: Samisdat.

Kafton-Minkel, Walter, 1989. Subterranean Worlds:
100,000 Years of Dragons, Dwarfs, the Dead, Lost
Races and UFOs from inside the Earth. Port
Townsend, WA: Loompanics Unlimited.

Michell, John, 1984. Eccentric Lives and Peculiar No -
tions. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Trench, Brinsley le Poer, 1974. Secret of the Ages: UFOs
from inside the Earth. London: Souvenir Press.
Walton, Bruce A., 1983. A Guide to the Inner Earth.

Jane Lew, WV: New Age Books.

X, Michael [pseudonym of Michael X. Barton],
1960. Rainbow City and the Inner Earth People.
Los Angeles: Futura.

Honor

In early January 1978, according to a West
German newspaper, a twelve-year-old Iranian
girl, identified only as Sara, underwent a series
of contacts with an extraterrestrial creature
named Honor. The contacts took place over a
seven-day period. Covered with black hair or
fur, Honor stood six and a half feet tall and
hailed from a world ten light years “ahead” of
Earth. Sara said that the extraterrestrial had
given her psychokinetic powers that allowed
her to move household appliances with mind
power alone.

124 Hopkins, Budd

Further Reading

Bartholomew, Robert E., and George S. Howard,
1998. UFOs and Alien Contact: Two Centuries of
Mystery. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Hopkins, Budd (1931- )

Bom in Wheeling, West Virginia, Budd Hop¬
kins graduated from Oberlin College in 1953.
He moved to New York City to embark on a
successful career as a painter, sculptor, and
writer on the arts. One day in 1964, he and
two other persons witnessed the appearance of
a disc-shaped object that remained in view for
two or three minutes. The experience sparked
Hopkins’s interest in UFOs. Though for the
next years that interest was confined to the oc¬
casional reading of UFO literature, in 1975
he participated in the investigation of a mul¬
tiply witnessed close encounter of the third
kind in a New Jersey park directly across the
Hudson River from Eighty-eighth Street in
Manhattan. Hopkins went on to become ac¬
tively involved in research on abductions. He
also became hugely influential in bringing
wider attention to the subject and shaping at¬
titudes toward it.

Hopkins brought mental-health profes¬
sionals into his work, which often involved
the use of hypnosis to retrieve ostensible
memories of abductions masked by amnesia.
His first book on the subject, Missing Time
(1981), detailed his case studies. A sequel, In -
truders (1987), brought forth an expanded vi¬
sion of the abduction experience, highlighting
the sexual aspects and apparent genetic exper¬
iments involving mysteriously terminated
pregnancies and human/alien hybrids. He also
argued that abductions are usually not one¬
time encounters but events that occur period¬
ically over abductees’ lifetimes. Hopkins had
also become convinced that abductions are far
more widespread than anyone had suspected.
He helped devise a survey conducted by the
Roper Poll. In Hopkins’s view the results—
which proved controversial and were read dif¬
ferently by some others—demonstrated that
millions of persons in the United States alone

Budd Hopkins, 1997 (Lisa Anders/Fortean Picture
Library)

are, whether they are consciously aware of it
or not, abductees.

A third Hopkins book, Witnessed (1996),
recounted a monumentally complex, ex¬
tremely bizarre abduction allegedly involving
a number of participants, including an un¬
named prominent international political fig¬
ure. (Published accounts have since identified
the man as Javier Perez de Cuellar, the Secre¬
tary-General of the United Nations. Perez de
Cuellar denies the story.) The claim sparked
an intense and often bewildering series of
charges and countercharges, though critics
were unable to uncover conclusive evidence to
support hoax allegations. Even so, the story
was so extreme, even by the standards of high¬
strangeness close encounters, that even sym¬
pathetic observers found it difficult to believe.
Hopkins wrote, “This abduction event so
drastically alters our knowledge of the alien
incursion in our world that it is easily the
most important in recorded history” (Hop¬
kins, 1996).

Hweig 125

Though some abduction proponents have
argued that abducting aliens are benignly in-
tentioned, Hopkins holds that they are indif¬
ferent to human beings and are coldly unemo¬
tional. Their purpose in coming here is to
study humans as if they were lab animals, and
they are particularly interested in our genetic
makeup.

See Also: Abductions by UFOs; Close encounters of
the third kind; Hybrid beings

Further Reading

Bloecher, Ted, Aphrodite Clamar, and Budd Hop¬
kins, 1985. Final Report on the Psychological Test -
mg of UFO “Abductees. ” Mount Rainier, MD:
Fund for UFO Research.

Hopkins, Budd, 1981. Missing Time: A Documented
Study of UFO Abductions. New York: Richard
Marek Publishers.

-, 1987. Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at

Copley Woods. New York: Random House.

-, 1996. Witnessed: The True Story of the

Brooklyn Bridge UFO Abductions. New York:
Pocket Books.

Unusual Personal Experiences: An Analysis of the Data
from Three National Surveys, 1992. Las Vegas,
NV: Bigelow Holding Corporation.

Hopkins’s Martians

In a letter published in the April 19, 1897,
issue of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a traveling
salesman named W. H. Hopkins reported that
while strolling through hills east of Spring-
field, Missouri, three days earlier, he encoun¬
tered two beautiful, unclad Martians.

The alleged incident occurred as newspa¬
pers throughout America were chronicling
often sensationalistic accounts of unidentified
aerial objects generally referred to as “air¬
ships,” though today they would be called
UFOs. Most people who took the reports seri¬
ously believed that the ships were the secret
creations of American inventors who soon
would reveal all, but there was also some spec¬
ulation that Martians might be touring Earth.
Dubious tales of encounters with extraterres¬
trials appeared in some newspapers.

Hopkins claimed that he had seen an air¬
ship landed in a clearing. The most “beautiful
being I ever beheld,” a naked young woman
with hair falling to her waist, stood next to the

craft. She was picking flowers, speaking all the
while in a musical voice in a language Hop¬
kins did not recognize. She was also vigor¬
ously fanning herself even though the day was
hardly warm. In the shade cast by the ship, a
naked man with shoulder-length hair and a
beard, fully as long as the woman’s hair, lay on
the ground, also working a fan.

Until Hopkins stepped forward, the couple
did not know they were being observed. The
man leaped to his feet, and the woman threw
herself into his arms. As Hopkins tried to as¬
sure them of his good intentions, they glared
back at him, clearly unable to understand
what he was saying. In time, however, the ten¬
sion dissipated, and a kind of conversation,
mostly involving gestures, ensued. When he
inquired about their place of origin, they
“pointed upwards, pronouncing a word
which, to my imagination, sounded like
Mars.” They studied him “with great curios¬
ity. .. . They felt of my clothing, looked at my
gray hair with surprise and examined my
watch with the greatest wonder.”

After he was given a tour of the interior,
the ship flew away with the occupants waving
farewell to Hopkins, “she a vision of loveliness
and he of manly vigor.”

See Also: Allingham’s Martian; Aurora Martian;
Brown’s Martians; Demons s Martians and Venu-
sians; Khauga; Martian bees; Michigan giant;
Mince-Pie Martians; Monka; Mullers Martians;
Oleson’s giants; Shaw’s Martians; Smead’s Mar¬
tians; Thompson’s Venusians; Wilcox’s Martians

Further Reading

Bullard, Thomas E., ed., 1982. The Airship File: A
Collection of Texts Concerning Phantom Airships
and Other UFOs, Gathered from Newspapers and
Periodicals Mostly during the Hundred Years Prior
to Kenneth Arnold’s Sighting. Bloomington, IN:
self-published.

Clark, Jerome, 1981. “The Coming of the Venu¬
sians.” Fate 34, 1 (January 1981): 49-55.

Hweig

Hweig is an extraterrestrial who channels
through an Oregon woman named Ida M.
Kannenberg. She believes that she first en¬
countered aliens in the California desert in

126 Hybrid beings

1940. According to testimony elicited under
hypnosis in 1980, aliens placed implants in¬
side her head to facilitate communication
later between them and her. In 1978, she
began to hear from Hweig on a regular basis,
after a failed 1968 experiment that so terrified
her that she ended up in a mental hospital.
She was released when no evidence of psy¬
chopathology could be uncovered.

Hweig and his associates are here to rejuve¬
nate Earth and its inhabitants. They plan to ac¬
complish these changes via communication
with contactees, who will be led to “certain dis¬
ciples and . . . specific discoveries” that will im¬
prove humanity’s lot and Earth’s environment.

See Also: Channeling

Further Reading

Sprinkle, R. Leo, 1999. Soul Samples: Personal Explo -
rations in Reincarnation and UFO Experiences.
Columbus, NC: Granite Publishing.

Hybrid beings

Hybrid beings are entities who are part
human and part humanoid. They figure in a
number of accounts of UFO abductions. Fe¬
male abductees sometimes report anomalous
pregnancies that are enigmatically terminated,
typically in association with a missing-time
experience of the sort in which the abductions
allegedly took place. In a subsequent onboard
UFO encounter, the aliens present the ab-
ductee with a child who has the features both
of the human mother and of the abducting
entities, most often described as thin, gray- or
white-skinned, with oversized heads and large,
hypnotic eyes.

As early as the late 1960s, paranormal
writer John A. Keel, investigating reports of
UFOs and other strange occurrences in New
York City and on Fong Island, noted that
some female witnesses experienced what he
called “hysterical pregnancies” (Keel, 1975).
Keel’s observation was little noted and soon
forgotten. In the 1980s, however, abduction
specialist Budd Hopkins independently came
upon the same phenomenon. Mostly through
the use of hypnosis, the women “recalled” in¬

stances in which a kind of suction device re¬
moved fetuses from their wombs. In later ab¬
ductions the women would be shown babies,
toddlers, and older children and told to touch
and interact with them in other ways. Though
generally human in appearance, the children
often appeared to be lacking the emotional
makeup of human beings.

In time, abductees reported encounters
with young adult hybrids. These hybrids,
among those sufficiently human-looking to
pass unnoticed on the street, would some¬
times have sexual relationships with younger
abductees, who may or may not have given
their consent. David M. Jacobs, who has writ¬
ten extensively on the issue of hybrids, be¬
lieves these particular beings are from a late
stage of the process. His investigations lead
him to believe that first-stage hybrids are half-
human/half-alien. These entities tend to look
“almost alien.” In the next stage, Jacobs specu¬
lates, “the aliens join a human egg and sperm
and assimilate genetic material from the first-
stage hybrid . . . into the zygote” (Jacobs,
1998). The third-stage hybrid, created from
human sperm and egg and genetic material
from a second-stage individual, looks more
human. Only in the latest stages, the fifth or
sixth, do the hybrids resemble humans
enough to walk among us and, just as impor¬
tant, reproduce. They retain the strong mental
and telepathic powers of their alien heritage,
however. In Jacobs’s view, based on testimony
from abductees whom he has hypnotized, the
aliens are preparing to replace the human race
with a hybrid population. The aliens them¬
selves are unable to reproduce, but through
hybrids, their species will survive—at the ex¬
pense of humanity’s. Jacobs holds that this
takeover could occur at any time and is more
likely to occur sooner than later.

Hybrids are a relatively new concept
among ufologists and in the accounts of al¬
leged UFO experiencers. In retrospect, some
have suggested that the presence of human or
humanlike beings in early close encounters of
the third kind suggests hybrids were being
seen before they were being recognized. In a

Hybrid beings 127

famous October 1957 Brazilian abduction
case, a young man allegedly had sexual inter¬
course with an alien woman who, were she to
have been reported in a more recent episode,
would probably be judged a hybrid. Through
hand gestures, the woman seemed to indicate
that the fruit of their union would be born on
another planet.

On the other hand, critics point out, hard
evidence for the existence of hybrids simply
does not exist. Most of the testimony to their
presence owes, moreover, to accounts elicited
under hypnosis, a state in which unconscious
fantasizing frequently occurs. Scientific critics
have stated flatly that hybridization proce¬
dures of the sort described are biologically im¬
possible. Though there is no shortage of anec¬
dotal testimony, no medically documented

instances of anomalously terminated pregnan¬
cies have ever been demonstrated.

See Also: Abductions by UFOs; Close encounters of
the third kind; Hopkins, Budd; Keel, John Alva

Further Reading

Hopkins, Budd, 1987. Intruders: The Incredible Visi -
tations at Copley Woods. New York: Random
House.

Jacobs, David M., 1992. Secret Life: Firsthand Ac -
counts of UFO Abductions. New York: Simon and
Schuster.

-, 1998. The Threat. New York: Simon and

Schuster.

Neal, Richard, 1991. “Missing Embryo/Fetus Syn¬
drome.” UFO 6 , 4 (July/August): 18-22.

Schnabel, Jim, 1994. Dark White: Aliens, Abduc -
tions, and the UFO Obsession. London: Hamish
Hamilton.

Swords, Michael D., 1988. “Extraterrestrial Hy¬
bridization Unlikely.” MUFON UFO Journal
247 (November): 6-10.

Imaginal beings

University of Connecticut psychologist Ken¬
neth Ring theorizes that an “imaginal realm”
exists somewhere between reality and fantasy.
In this “third kingdom,” entered through
(Ring’s italics) “certain altered states of con -
sciousness that have the effect of undermining
ordinary perception and conceptual thinking”
(Ring, 1992), one encounters magical yet
semireal entities such as UFO beings, angels,
and various otherworldly intelligences. Ring’s
imaginal realm is much like the “interdimen-
sional mind” of another parapsychological
theorist, Michael Grosso.

To test certain aspects of the hypothesis,
Ring and a colleague, Christopher J. Rosing,
conducted extensive psychological testing of
several groups. They found that persons who
report UFO-abduction experiences and those
who have undergone near-death experiences
are psychologically indistinguishable. Though
not fantasy-prone in the clinical sense, they
have felt a connection with nonordinary real¬
ities since childhood. Moreover, those child¬
hoods were troubled with episodes of abuse,
trauma, or serious illness. Because of these
difficulties, these individuals have developed
a “dissociative response style as a means of
psychological defense .” This causes them to be

so focused on their internal state that their
consciousness has changed in radical ways.
This expanded consciousness allows them to
enter the imaginal realm, there to meet ex¬
traordinary beings and undergo positive life
changes.

UFO abductees and near-death experients,
in Ring’s view, are prophets—modern
shamans—who are picking up coded mes¬
sages from the otherworld. Abductees see
“small, gray, sickly looking” aliens whose
heads are too big for their bodies. They look,
in other words, like starving children. Ring
reads this to mean, “The future of the human
race—symbolized by the archetype of the
child—is menaced as never before.” Our
planet is experiencing a “near-death crisis,”
and we need to listen to what these “extraordi¬
nary experiences” are telling us. They are
leading us to a “cosmic-centered view of our
place in creation, a myth that has the power to
ignite the fires of a worldwide planetary re¬
generation and thus to save us from the icy
blasts ofThanatos’s nuclear winter.”

Further Reading

Ring, Kenneth, 1992. The Omega Project: Near-Death
Experiences, UFO Encounters, and Mind at Large.
New York: William Morrow and Company.

129

130 Insectoids

Insectoids

Some UFO abductees report onboard en¬
counters with entities that resemble giant
praying mantises. These beings, typically
dressed in capes with long robes and high col¬
lars, are seen in association with the smaller,
humanoid grays, though they appear to have a
higher rank than their colleagues. “Other
aliens appear to act somewhat subservient to
the insectlike beings,” abduction investigator
David M. Jacobs has written.

Insectoids seldom participate direcdy in the
physical examinations of humans, though they
may engage in what Jacobs calls “staring proce¬
dures,” wherein an alien puts its face close to
an abductees, telepathically probes the con¬
tents of the individual’s mind, stimulates emo¬
tions (everything from fear to love to sexual
arousal) and conjures up hallucinatory images
into it. Though the grays have little to say to
abductees, insectoids sometimes are commu¬
nicative. In one of Jacobs’s cases, a woman re¬
ported being told that it was the aliens’ inten¬
tion to take over the Earth with the insectoids
in charge of this new world order.

See Also: Abductions by aliens; MU the Mantis
being; Nordics

Further Reading

Jacobs, David M., 1998. The Threat. New York:
Simon and Schuster.

Lewels, Joe, 1997. The God Hypothesis: Extraterres -
trial Life and Its Implications for Science and Reli -
gion. Mill Spring, NC: Wild Flower Press.

Intelligences from Beyond
(Intelligences du Dehors)

Intelligences du Dehors—“intelligences from
beyond” in English translation—allegedly
channeled through French contactee Jean-
Pierre Prevost. Prevost, a heretofore-obscure
street merchant, had risen to public attention
through his involvement in a sensational inci¬
dent said to have occurred on the morning of
November 26, 1979, in a Paris suburb. Prevost
and another business associate reportedly wit¬
nessed the disappearance of their friend Franck
Fontaine in the wake of a close encounter with
a UFO. Fontaine showed up a week later,

claiming not to remember anything that hap¬
pened in the interim. Police and civilian UFO
investigators suspected a hoax.

Nonetheless, French science-fiction writer
Jimmy Guieu rushed into print with a book
on the case, but with a difference. In the
book, Contacts OVNI Cergy-Pontoise (1980),
Prevost became the central figure in the
episode, the intended target of the alien ab¬
duction. Within months, Prevost’s own book
recounted his extraterrestrial contacts with a
strong emphasis on the usual contactee mes¬
sage about noble space visitors and confused,
destructive earthlings. His principal contact
was a wise space being named Haurrio. Read¬
ers inclined to doubt all of this could only
wonder at Prevost statements such as this one:
“What does it matter to know, at the factual
level, where real life ends and imagination
takes over? Isn’t it more important to take into
consideration the content of the messages?”
(Bonabot, 1983).

In a July 7, 1983, newspaper interview,
Prevost confessed that both the Fontaine ab¬
duction and his own space contacts were fake,
concocted, he said, to attract an audience to
his philosophical messages by putting them in
the mouths of advanced intelligences. Even
so, he still tried to start a group with him at
the head, but it failed, as did a publishing en¬
terprise and an FM radio station. Interviewed
by ufologist Jacques Vallee in 1989, Fontaine
stuck to his story but charged that Prevost was
lying about his.

See Also: Abductions by UFOs; Contactees

Further Reading

Bonabot, Jacques, 1983. “1979 Fontaine Case in
France Now Admitted to Be a Hoax.” MUFON
UFO Journal 190 (December): 10.

Evans, Hilary, with Michel Piccin, 1982. “Who
Took Who [sic] for a Ride?” Fate 35, 10 (Octo¬
ber): 51-58.

Vallee, Jacques, 1991. Revelations: Alien Contact and
Human Deception. New York: Ballantine Books.

Ishkomar

Ishkomar, an extraterrestrial, began channeling
for the first time in late September 1966

Ishkomar 131

through a Phoenix man identified only as
Charles—“a blue-collar worker of modest edu¬
cation” (Steiger, 1973). Ishkomar said he was
speaking via telepathic light beamed from a
spaceship in Earths atmosphere. He himself
had lived long enough so that he was able to
discard a physical body, though the ship “con¬
tains others of us who are in human form.”
Ishkomar began his Earth mission some thirty
thousand years ago to accelerate evolution so
that human beings could develop more quickly
and be able to accept guidance—though not
control, which galactic law forbids—from wise
space people like himself. “You must reach a
high level of mental development and knowl¬
edge to be able to understand our purposes,”
he said, so the work continues.

Ishkomar also warned that another group
also worked in Earth’s space. This group, while
not necessarily evil in itself, had purposes at
odds with humanity’s best interests, and its
members sought to control human destiny.
Ishkomar refused to condemn these beings,
saying only that their purpose “conflicts with
our purpose. This does not mean that their in¬
tentions are not good or honorable.”

Soon there would be “great upheavals” on
Earth’s surface, and there would be much suf¬
fering and death. Only those who were men¬

tally and physically prepared would survive.
The extraterrestrials did not plan any massive
rescue operation, since “you are of no use to
us in the Outer Reaches.” But they would
help those human beings who heeded their
words to make their planet improved and liv¬
able after the changes.

Ishkomar said his people were not con¬
cerned solely with Earth. They were galactic
travelers and were involved with the fates of
many worlds throughout the cosmos.

Charles told Brad Steiger that he had no
idea why he had been chosen, unless it was
because of a sighting of what he took to be a
UFO in Michigan in 1956. While observing
the object, he beamed a mental message to its
presumed occupants and told them, “I would
like to be your friend.”

After the Ishkomar messages started com¬
ing a decade later, Charles and his wife, Lois,
formed a small group. As Charles channeled,
members asked questions and learned lessons.
Ishkomar firmly instructed them never to re¬
veal Charles’s full name, lest his life be endan¬
gered by unfriendly forces.

See Also: Channeling

Further Reading

Steiger, Brad, 1973. Revelation: The Divine Fire. En¬
glewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

J.w

In 1953, a voice in her head identified itself to
Gloria Lee, a former child actress and model,
as that of “J. W.,” an inhabitant of Jupiter.
Not quite convinced, Lee demanded physical
evidence of J. W.’s existence. Some days after¬
ward, J. W. alerted her to the presence of a fly¬
ing saucer passing over her backyard in
Westchester, California. Lee went on to form
the Cosmon Research Foundation, which at¬
tracted as many as two thousand members, as
a forum for the distribution of J. W.’s teach¬
ings, essentially a variation of Theosophy. She
also wrote Why We Are Here (1959), a book
widely read in early contactee circles.

Lee became a martyr to the contact move¬
ment in 1962 through tragic circumstances.
J. W. had provided her with spaceship blue¬
prints and instructed her to take them to
Washington, DC, to show officials. But when
she and associate Hedy Hood went there, no
one was interested in meeting them. Lee told
her friend that J. W. had now informed her,
“The space people are going to invade the
earth and establish a peace program” (Barker,
1965). She was also ordered to go on a fast for
peace that would end when a “light elevator”
(spaceship) arrived to transfer her to J. W.’s
home planet. The fast began on September 23
and lasted till November 28, when Lee’s

alarmed husband had her rushed to a hospital.
She died there on December 7.

In less than two months, according to a
Florida-based contactee group, Mark-Age
MetaCenter, Lee herself was sending psychic
messages from Jupiter. She promised that
spaceships would land on Earth within six
months if they were received in peace and good
will. She also mentioned that the recently de¬
ceased Marilyn Monroe had just arrived. Over
the years, Mark-Age would publish five vol¬
umes of Lee-generated channeled material.

Further Reading

Korsholm, Jananda, 1995. “UFO’s, Close Encoun¬
ters of the Positive Kind.” http://spiritweb.org/
Spirit/ufo-positive-negative-jananda.html

Janus

In his memoirs, Air Marshal Sir Peter Horsley,
onetime Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the

Royal Air Force’s Strike Command, later
Equerry for the Royal Family, recounts a meet¬
ing with a self-identified extraterrestrial who
was introduced to him as “Janus.” He says the
incident took place one winter day in 1954,
after an acquaintance, a high-ranking military
officer interested in UFOs and convinced of
their friendly intentions, phoned him with a
curious message: to go that evening to a house
in London’s Chelsea district. A woman met
him at the door and led him into a dimly lit
room, where he was introduced to a “Mr.
Janus.” The stranger immediately asked him to
tell him what he knew about UFOs. After¬
ward, Mr. Janus expressed a desire to meet
Prince Philip, then launched into a two-hour
discourse on space travel, visitors from other
worlds, cosmology, and philosophy. Janus
stressed the human race’s immaturity and its
potential to destroy itself. In the course of this
conversation, Horsley came to believe that the
stranger was reading his mind.

Janus said that advanced “observers” from
distant planets are watching Earth, contacting
a select few trustworthy terrestrials while try¬
ing not to interfere directly in human affairs.
Once human beings have learned interstellar
travel, he said, “it is of paramount importance
that you have learnt your responsibilities for
the preservation of life elsewhere” (Horsley,
1997). In the meantime, the visitors also want
to ensure that they leave no conclusive proof
of their presence.

Horsley wrote that there was an odd se¬
quel. Shortly after the meeting he prepared a
memo and gave it to Lieutenant General Sir
Frederick Browning, Treasurer to Prince
Philip. Browning pressed Horsley to arrange
another encounter. Horsley tried repeatedly
and unsuccessfully to reach the woman at
whose flat he had spoken with Janus. After a
few days he personally went to her residence,
only to learn that she had suddenly moved
out. The general who had set up the en¬
counter became “distant and evasive” when
Horsley got in touch with him. He never saw
him, the woman, or Janus again.

Interviewed by British ufologist Timothy
Good, Horsley thought it “strange” that he

Jinns 135

had only a general impression of Janus’s ap¬
pearance. He remembered only a normal¬
looking man, approximately forty-five to fifty
years old, thinning gray hair, and dressed in
suit and tie.

When Horsley’s book was published, the
London Times ran an article by Dr. Thomas
Stuttaford, who suggested that Horsley was
suffering from hallucination. Horsley in¬
sists, however, that the incident occurred as
reported.

Further Reading

Good, Timothy, 1998. Alien Base: Earth’s Encounters
with Extraterrestrials. London: Century.

Horsley, Sir Peter, 1997. Sounds from Another Room:
Memories of Planes, Princes and the Paranormal.
London: Leo Cooper.

Stuttaford, Thomas, 1997. “Air Marshal’s Flight of
Fancy.” London Times (August 14).

Jerhoam

Jerhoam is a “State of Consciousness” who
channels through John Oliver. He is here, he
says, to help humans “incorporate the Great
Knowledge of the Soul into life to become
more aware ... to become more awake, to be¬
come more loved, and to know how to express
love in many ways.” He also seeks to recon¬
nect with students from that time, persons
who have reincarnated and live on Earth now.

Many centuries ago—thousands of years
before the Great Pyramid was constructed—
Jerhoam occupied a physical body, teaching at
the Great School of Ancient Wisdom.

Further Reading

“An Introduction: Who Is Jerhoam?” http://www.
jerhoam.com/whoisjer.html.

Jessup’s “little people”

Morris Ketchum Jessup (1900-1959) wrote
four books on UFOs between 1955 and
1957. His book The Case for the UFO (1955)
was the first to use “UFO” in its title; hereto¬
fore, publishers preferred the then more fa¬
miliar “flying saucers.” Jessup also was an ear¬
lier theorist in what would be called the
“ancient astronaut” genre, though his particu¬
lar interpretation remains unique. He believed

that the “little people” sometimes reported in
connection with UFOs are literally that: pyg¬
mies of earthly origin and the creators of an
extraordinary technology that gave them
space flight long ago.

Jessup first hinted at his theory in UFO
and the Bible (1956), asserting that all UFO
evidence pointed to the presence of “space-in¬
telligence, relatively near the earth, but yet
away from it and in open space . . . using nav-
igatable contrivances.” In his earlier life, he
had done graduate-level work in astronomy at
the University of Michigan. In the course of
his studies, and later in his adult life, he trav¬
eled in Africa and South America, often stop¬
ping to examine archaeological artifacts. He
became convinced that only an advanced civi¬
lization, with a technology that encompassed
teleportation, levitation, and space flight,
could have created such structures.

Eventually, he came to believe that about
100,000 years ago, “in the pre-cataclysmic era
which developed a first wave of civilization .. .
space flight originated on this planet. . . . We
may assume that the Pygmies . . . developed a
civilization which discovered the principle of
gravitation and put it to work” (Jessup, 1957).
When Atlantis and Mu sank into the oceans,
the “little people” fled in their spaceships.
They now reside on the moon and in floating
structures in a “gravity neutral” zone between
Earth and its satellite.

See Also: Atlantis; Lemuria

Further Reading

Jessup, M. K., 1955. The Case for the UFO. New
York: Citadel Press.

-, 1956. UFO and the Bible. New York:

Citadel Press.

-, 1957. The Expanding Case for the UFO.

New York: Citadel Press.

Jinns

In traditional Arabic and Persian belief, jinns
are demonic, shape-shifting entities. Over the
centuries, the idea evolved that a few jinns are
good. There are five kinds of jinns, and only
one has occasional benevolent qualities. Typi¬
cally, jinns take the shapes of insects, toads,
scorpions, and other animals deemed unap-

136 Joseph

pealing or obnoxious. The tradition bears
some resemblance to traditions of fairy folk in
other societies. At least two prominent writers
on the UFO phenomenon, Gordon Creighton
and Ann Druffel, are convinced that UFO be¬
ings are jinns in disguise.

Under the editorship of Charles Bowen,
England’s Flying Saucer Review, then a widely
read UFO journal, moved the publication
away from speculations about extraterrestrial
visitation toward interpretations that cast
UFOs in paranormal terms. No other contrib¬
utor did so as enthusiastically as Creighton, a
retired British diplomat with a keen interest in
demonology. After Bowens illness and subse¬
quent death in the 1980s, Creighton assumed
editorship of the magazine and promptly de¬
clared that he had identified the intelligences
behind UFO sightings, encounters, and ab¬
ductions: jinns. In an article in a 1983 issue,
he pointed out that jinns materialize and de-
materialize, switch between visibility and in¬
visibility, change shape, kidnap humans, lie,
control minds, and engage their victims in
sexual intercourse—behaviors associated with
UFO entities.

FJe was convinced that the jinns are up to
no good. In follow-up writings, he contended
that these sinister supernatural powers secretly
control Earth, using thought control to get
humans to do their bidding. They are behind
crime and violence, and they have brought
AIDS and other deadly diseases into the pop¬
ulation. “Another great World War may be in
the making,” he wrote in 1990, engineered
for cosmic purposes we cannot understand;
humans are merely property and playthings
and are soon to be removed from the face of
the Earth.

Ufologists responded to these notions with
a tactful silence with one exception: Ann
Druffel, an abduction-research specialist who
finds “startling similarities between reports of
abduction scenarios in the Western world and
Gordon Creightons excellent research on the
jinns” (Druffel, 1998). Druffel, a Californian,
investigated the experiences of an Iranian-
American she calls Timur. Timur encountered

humanoids in out-of-ordinary states of con¬
sciousness—sleep paralysis, meditation, astral
travel—and recognized them as the jinns he
had heard of in his native country.

Druffel concludes that “our own faeries
and jinns are merely an old human problem,
shape-shifted and wearing space garb to fool
us. They can be fended off by stouthearted,
determined individuals.”

See Also: Fairies encountered

Further Reading

Creighton, Gordon, 1983. “A Brief Account of the
True Nature of the ‘UFO Entities’.” Flying Saucer
Review 29, 1 (October): 2-6.

-, 1989. “AIDS.” Flying Saucer Review 34, 1

(March Quarter): 12.

-, 1990. “Grave Days.” Flying Saucer Review

35, 3 (September): 1.

Druffel, Ann, 1998. Flow to Defend Yourself against
Alien Abduction. New York: Three Rivers Press.

Joseph

A Todmorden, Yorkshire, England, police of¬
ficer named Alan Godfrey was on patrol at
5:05 A.M., November 28, 1980, when he en¬
countered a metallic disc with a dome and a
row of windows. When he attempted to alert
headquarters, he found that his radio was not
working. Suddenly, he found himself one
hundred yards farther down the road than he
thought he was, and the UFO was gone. Fie
vaguely recalled getting out of his car and
hearing a voice. Under hypnosis later, God¬
frey “recalled” that he lost consciousness after
a light from the object struck him. Then he
felt himself floating into the craft and meeting
a humanlike being named Joseph.

Six feet tall, friendly in manner, Joseph had
a thin nose, a beard, and a mustache. FJe woie
a skullcap and was clad in a sheet, making
him look something like a prophet from the
Bible. A large black dog accompanied him.
The room also contained eight robots, each
about three and a half feet tall, making a sort
of murmuring chatter. When they touched
Godfrey, beeping sounds emanated from
them. Joseph directed Godfrey to a bed,
where he lay as a beam of light from the ceil-

Policeman Alan Godfrey, who was allegedly abducted into a UFO at Todmorden, Yorkshire, drawing a picture of ‘Joseph,
November 1980 (Janet and Colin Bord/Fortean Picture Library)

ing shone on him. Communicating by telepa¬
thy, Joseph touched his head, and Godfrey
lapsed into unconsciousness for an undeter¬
mined period. The robots took off Godfrey’s
shoes and studied his toes. Meanwhile, instru¬
ments placed on his arms and legs caused him
discomfort to the point of sickness. A foul
odor permeated his nostrils. Joseph asked him
questions, but Godfrey would refuse to tell in¬
vestigators what they were. The alien indi¬
cated that they had met before, apparently
when Godfrey was a child.

Godfrey would remember an earlier inci¬
dent from 1965, when he was 18. Around 2

A.M., he and a girlfriend stopped their car
abruptly when a woman and a dog stepped
out in front of them. Certain that he had hit
the woman, he got out to help her, but there
was no sign of her or the animal. When he got
home, he found that two hours were missing
without explanation. Another incident—his
seeing a ball of light in his room when he was
a child—also seemed to him evidence that the
1980 incident was not his first encounter with
aliens.

Further Reading

Randles, Jenny, 1983. The Pennine UFO Mystery.

London: Granada.

Kantarians

For four nights in September 1961, David
Paladin’s son claimed that somebody named
Itan was coming into his bedroom and taking
him away in a big “sky car.” Though at first
Paladin dismissed this as a child’s fantasy, a
neighbor claimed that he had seen a tall, thin
man walking the boy toward a waiting flying
saucer. That November Itan came into Pal¬
adin’s own bedroom and engaged him in a
telepathic conversation. Fie and his people,
the Kantarians, lived on a planet in another
dimension. They do not interfere directly in
human affairs, but they have contacted certain
human beings in the hope that they could
gently push the human race in a more mature,
positive direction. They had been observing
humans since the beginning of Homo sapiens
and had even left a genetic imprint in some
humans.

Paladin claimed years of psychic connec¬
tion with the Kantarian Confederation. Itan
and his friends have told him that if human
beings destroy themselves, the space people
can do nothing. But if natural cataclysms
threaten human existence, the Kantarians will
perform a rescue operation. Mostly, though,
they hope that humans will reform them¬
selves, develop wisdom and kindness, and join
their Space Brothers in the cosmos one day.

Further Reading

Montgomery, Ruth, 1985. Aliens among Us. New
York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

Kappa

In traditional Japanese lore the Kappa are ma¬
licious water demons shaped like monkeys
with scales. They lure the unsuspecting into
ponds and rivers, then devour them. One Ja¬
panese writer, Komatsu Kitamura, has theo¬
rized that the Kappa were extraterrestrials who
came to Japan sometime between the ninth
and eleventh centuries. Others have picked up
on this speculation, suggesting that the osten¬
sibly scaly skin was actually a spacesuit. Al¬
leged sightings continue even now. In No¬
vember 1978, two construction workers
fishing off the coast of the port city Yokosuka
reported seeing a creature abruptly emerge
from the sea to glare at them. “It was not a
fish, an animal, or a man,” one said. “It was
about three meters [ten feet] in height and
[was] covered with thick, scaly skin like a rep¬
tile. It had a face and two large yellow eyes”
(Picasso, 1991).

Argentine ufologist Fabio Picasso has col¬
lected what he judges to be more or less com¬
parable reports from his country. For example,
on the evening of April 22, 1980, a motorist

139

140 Karen

A Japanese print depicting a Kappa (Victoria and Albert
Museum, London/Art Resource, NY)

in Santa Rosa noticed something falling out
of the sky. At that moment, his car engine
suddenly ceased functioning. When he got
out to check the motor, he noticed a cold
breeze at foot level. Looking down, he saw the
legs of something that clearly was not human.
Looking up, he saw two humanoid creatures,
approximately seven feet in height, approach¬
ing him. They had webbed hands and were
clothed in black, shiny diving suits. Their
faces were “skull-like.” Though their protrud¬
ing mouths were moving, no words were
coming out of them. One put its cold hands
around the witness’s head, and he passed out.
He revived a few minutes afterward, but a half
mile from where he had been.

Further Reading

Picasso, Fabio, 1991. “Infrequent Types of South
American Humanoids.” Strange Magazine 8
(Fall): 21-23, 44.

Karen

Late at night, on the highway between Matias
and Barbosa, Brazil, on January 21, 1976, a
couple in a car saw a blue light envelope the
landscape. The light moved toward them until
it covered their vehicle. The car “was absorbed

as if through a chimney” into a brilliandy lumi¬
nous circular object. Two dark-featured figures,
male and more than six feet tall, approached
and signaled that the two humans should step
out of their car. The ground seemed to move
under them, and the woman said she felt
drunk even though she had consumed no alco¬
hol. The couple could not understand the
aliens’ strange language until one gave each of
them a headset and plugged it into a device. At
that moment, the words became understand¬
able. The being introduced himself as Karen
and urged them to remain calm.

The woman underwent a series of medical
tests. She and her husband also drank a liquid
with an unappealing taste. Other aliens, one of
them female, appeared as Karen explained to
them that he and his people were conducting
medical research, even though on their world
they had conquered all illness, and no one ever
died anymore. He warned them not to talk
about their experience, since people would
think they were insane. If they wished, he
added, they could have their memories erased.
The couple turned down that offer. The woman
claimed some subsequent psychic contacts.

Further Reading

Bartholomew, Robert E., and George S. Howard,
1998. UFOs and Alien Contact: Two Centuries of
Mystery. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Karmic Board

All living entities must pass before the Karmic
Board before they can be incarnated on Earth.
Each entity receives its assignment, and at the
end of that assignment (bodily death) the en¬
tity appears before the board once more, this
time to have its performance reviewed. The
Karmic Board “dispenses justice to this system
of worlds, adjudicating karma, mercy and
judgment on behalf of every lifestream”
(“Lords of Karma,” n.d.).

Members of the Karmic Board include the
Great Divine Director, the Goddess of Lib¬
erty, Ascended Lady Master Nada, Cyclopea
(Elohim of the Fifth Ray), Pallas Athena

Kazik 141

(Goddess of Truth), Portia (Goddess of Jus¬
tice), and Kuan Yin (Goddess of Mercy).
Further Reading

“Lords of Karma,” n.d. http://www.ascension-
research.org/karma.html

Kazik

In September 1953, Albert K. Bender of
Bridgeport, Connecticut, suddenly shut down
his International Flying Saucer Bureau
(IFSB), confiding to a few close friends that
three men in black had threatened him and
given him the frightening answer to the UFO
mystery. Though Bender would provide few
details, he hinted that the visitors were agents
of the U.S. government. His alleged experi¬
ence led an associate, Gray Barker, to write a
sensational and paranoia-drenched book,
They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers
(1956), about Bender and other supposedly
silenced UFO researchers. Eventually, Barker,
who had started a small West Virginia-based
publishing company, persuaded Bender to re¬
veal what had happened to him. In Flying
Saucers and the Three Men (1962), Bender
wrote that he had run afoul, not of a terres¬
trial intelligence agency, but of extraterrestrial
intelligences from the planet Kazik.

Benders IFSB had come into existence in
April 1952 and was soon among the most suc¬
cessful of early UFO groups, claiming as
many as six hundred members in a number of
countries. Bender was also an enthusiastic sci¬
ence-fiction fan. A bachelor, he lived in a
house full of artifacts from horror films, and
at night, as he lay in bed, he would imagine
himself sailing out of his body and into deep
space. Soon, according to Bender’s book,
weird things began happening to him. Strange
lights and disembodied footsteps frightened
him, and once glowing eyes, accompanied by
a stench of sulfur, stared at him. With col¬
leagues in Australia and New Zealand, Bender
speculated about a saucer base inside the
South Pole, and they laid plans for a research
project to study that possibility.

Bender urged his membership to try to
contact the saucers telepathically at the same
hour on March 15, 1953. While participat¬
ing, he underwent an out-of-body experience
and then heard a voice warning him to “dis¬
continue delving into the mysteries of the
universe.”

A few weeks later, he returned home from a
two-week vacation to smell the sulfur odor. A
few hours later, three shadowy, apparitional
figures dressed in dark suits spoke to him.
They gave him a device with which he could
contact them; all he had to do was hold it
tightly in his palm and say “Kazik” over and
over again. Two days later, he attempted con¬
tact. The experience initiated a series of en¬
counters with monstrous beings who revealed
that “Kazik” was the name of their home
planet. They took Bender to their antarctic
base, where they revealed their big secret: they
had come to Earth to gather and refine sea
water. They also told him that God does not
exist and that there is no life after death.

Bender was given a disc that monitored his
activities and ensured his silence until they
completed their business, which was in I960
when they departed from our planet. Bender
was free to tell his story, which he did in a
book that few, including (privately) Barker,
saw as anything more than a not particularly
interesting science-fiction novel. Two critics
pointed to the story’s inherent implausibility:
“The story lacks a good solid motive or pur¬
pose. . . . Flow could Bender or anyone else
have discovered [the Kazakians’] secret until
they chose to reveal it; and if they wished their
secret to remain unknown, what possible pur¬
pose could they have had in revealing it delib¬
erately to Bender, only to have to then force
silence upon him, causing him physical pain
and disturbing his peace of mind for the next
eight years? . . . What was so significant about
a few tons of sea water?. . . What had such
entities to fear from anyone, if Bender did
publish such a ‘secret’? Who would believe it,
or be able to interfere with such an advanced
civilization?” (Beasley and Sampsel, 1963).

142 Keel, John Alva

Twelve years after Three Mens publication,
Barker expressed the view that the story was
something Bender had conjured up “in a
trance or a dream” (Barker, 1976). Most ob¬
servers, however, suspected it to be conscious
fiction. One fantastic theory, proposed in
1980 by British ufologist Brian Burden, held
that an intelligence agency had subjected Ben¬
der to a thought-control experiment and
caused him to hallucinate space people.

Further Reading

Barker, Gray, 1956. They Knew Too Much about Fly -
ing Saucers. New York: University Books.

-, 1976. Interviewed by Jerome Clark.

Barker, Gray, ed., 1962. Bender Mystery Confirmed.
Clarksburg, WV: Saucerian Books.

Beasley, H. P., and A. V. Sampsel, 1963. “The Ben¬
der Mystery—Still a Mystery?” Flying Saucers
(May): 20-27.

Bender, Albert K., 1962. Flying Saucers and the Three
Men. Clarksburg, WV: Saucerian Books.

Burden, Brian, 1980. “MIBs and the Intelligence
Community.” Awareness 9, 1 (Spring): 6-13.

Young, Jerry A., and Gray Barker, 1976. “Letters.”

Gray Barker’s Newsletter 3 (January): 7-12.

Keel, John Alva (1930- )

Born Alva John Kiehl in Hornell, New York,
on March 25, 1930, John Keel would discover
the writings of anomalist Charles Fort
(1874-1932) at an early age. He grew up to
be a Manhattan-based writer who eventually
became internationally known for radical,
neodemonological interpretadons of UFO,
anomalous and paranormal phenomena. Keel
would speculate that a wide range of other¬
worldly entities, none of which regard the
human race with favor (“ultraterrestrials,” to
use his term), emerge from an alternative real¬
ity he calls the “superspectrum.”

Keel claims to have attended the first fly¬
ing-saucer convention ever held, “in the old
Labor Temple on New York’s 14th Street”
(Keel, 1991). After a tour of duty in the mil-

John Alva Keel (August C. Roberts/Fortean Picture Library)

Kihief 143

itary in the early 1950s, he wandered the
East and wrote his first book, Jadoo (1957),
on his adventures and observations. He
wrote that while in the Himalayas, he saw
the yeti (“abominable snowman”), a beast he
would come to think of as a “demon”
(Chorvinsky, 1990). In the 1960s, he em¬
barked full time on investigations of UFOs,
men in black, monsters (including Moth-
man, an eerie winged humanlike creature
with which Keel’s name would forever after
be associated), contactees, and more. He
even reported having his own encounters
with unearthly entities. Borrowing from Cal¬
ifornia occult theorist N. Meade Layne, Keel
became convinced that there are no visiting
extraterrestrials, only shape-changing super¬
natural beings “composed of energy from the
upper frequencies of the electro-magnetic
spectrum. Somehow they can descend to the
narrow (very narrow) range of visible light
and can be manipulated into any desirable
form. . . . Once they have completed their
mission . . . they . . . revert to an energy state
and disappear from our field of vision—for¬
ever” (Keel, 1969).

Though dismissed by some as a crank, Keel
has been an influential theorist in some ufo¬
logical and Fortean circles. His critics have
charged him with careless writing and
credulity, but his admirers prefer to think of
him as a bold, even outrageous, iconoclast.

See Also: Contactees; Men in black; Mothman; Ul¬
traterrestrials

Further Reading

Chorvinsky, Mark, 1990. “Cryptozoo Conversation
with John A. Keel.” Strange Magazine 5: 35-40.

Clark, Jerome, 1997. Spacemen, Demons, and Con -
spiracies: The Evolution of UFO Hypotheses.
Mount Rainier, MD: Fund for UFO Research.

Keel, John A., 1970. UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse.
New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

-, 1971. Our Haunted Planet. Greenwich, CT:

Fawcett Publications.

-, 1975. The Eighth Tower. New York: Satur¬
day Review Press/E. P. Dutton and Company.

-, 1975. The Mothman Prophecies. New York:

Saturday Review Press/E. P. Dutton and Company.

-, 1988. Disneyland of the Gods. New York:

Amok Press.

-, 1969. “The Principle of Transmogrifica¬
tion.” Flying Saucer Review 15, 4 (July/August):
27-28, 31.

Khauga

Khauga is a “Celestial Being” whom William
Ferguson met in an out-of-body state while
meditating on the evening of January 12,
1947. Traveling at the “speed of conscious¬
ness,” he found himself on Mars within ten
seconds. Khauga met him on his arrival, re¬
marking that he had something to say about
“the observations that we have made of your
planet.” He also wanted Ferguson to pass on
some messages to his fellow earthlings.

According to Khauga, a great network of
canals covers the planet. Electromagnetic
fields enclose its cities. Martians themselves,
all of whom have red hair, red complexions,
and broad features, float through the air via
levitation. They are a foot shorter than the
typical Earth person. Khauga expressed in¬
credulity that human beings kill each other in
battles. Martians, he said, are twenty thou¬
sand years ahead of earthlings in spiritual evo¬
lution and scientific development. Concerned
about the state of affairs on our planet, the
Martians had decided to “release positive en¬
ergy particles into the earth’s atmosphere . . .
to counteract the negative energy particles
that man himself has released” (Ferguson,
1954). Khauga asked Ferguson to assure the
people of Earth that things would soon be
much better in their world.

See Also: Allingham’s Martian; Aurora Martian;
Brown’s Martians; Dentons’s Martians and Venu-
sians; Hopkins’s Martians; Martian bees; Mince-
Pie Martians; Muller’s Martians; Shaw’s Mar¬
tians; Smead’s Martians; Wilcox’s Martians

Further Reading

Ferguson, William, 1954. My Trip to Mars. Potomac,
MD: Cosmic Study Center.

Kihief

Kihief was the spirit guide to the late Francie
Paschal Steiger, who with her then-husband,
Brad Steiger, spearheaded the Star People

144 King Leo

movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Paschal Steiger believed herself to be a reincar¬
nated extraterrestrial. Kihief, who guided her
through her life, said he was from a place “like
unto Venus” (Steiger and Steiger, 1981). She
took his words to mean that he was from an
otherdimensional counterpart to Earth’s (un¬
inhabitable) sister planet. Throughout her
lifetime, Paschal Steiger interacted with a vari¬
ety of friendly, spiritually advanced space peo¬
ple. She met the first of them when, as a five-
year-old child, she saw a robed being whom
she took to be an “angel.”

Further Reading

Steiger, Brad, 1976. Gods of Aquarius: UFOs and the
Transformation of Man. New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich.

Steiger, Brad, and Francie Steiger, 1981. The Star
People. New York: Berkley Books.

Steiger, Francie, 1982. Reflections from an Angel’s Eye.
New York: Berkley Books.

King Leo

King Leo is a reptilian being who is descended
from the dinosaurs. He and his fellows live in
an underground kingdom, where they have
resided since just before the catastrophe that
destroyed other life from the Age of Reptiles.
Some have met him in person, but most of his
communications come through channeling.

King Leo got his name from a woman who
prefers to call herself Joy D’Light (sometimes
JoyDLight). Her association with reptilian be¬
ings began on November 7, 1961, when she
and her husband, an air force man, were liv¬
ing in Oregon. Her husband had left town on
assignment, and it was her first night alone.
That night, from her open bedroom door fac¬
ing the kitchen, she saw three bipedal reptil¬
ian beings standing next to her refrigerator.
Six and a half feet tall, they had scaly skin and
spikes down their backs; their eyes were yel¬
low. Too frightened to leave her bed, she even¬
tually fell asleep. They were gone when she
woke up; nonetheless, they appeared every
night for two months thereafter. Often they
were waiting for her when she came home

from work. Eventually, she took up a brief res¬
idence with her sister and returned only after
some days had passed. The entities, who had
never harmed her or spoken with her, were
not there.

That changed in 1996 when one showed
up in her house. She was wide awake and not
in her bedroom this time, and she no longer
felt the terror she had originally experienced.
The being spoke for the first time, assuring
her that he and his companions had never
meant to harm her; they were just interested
in her. He vanished after a few moments. On
another occasion this being or one much like
it showed up briefly on the television screen
while she was surfing channels. The following
year, one appeared for about five minutes be¬
fore disappearing without communicating.

One day in July 1998, she lay down to rest
when instantly she found herself transported
to an underground kingdom. The ruler, who
was standing in front of her, initiated a con¬
versation, during which he told her that origi¬
nally the reptilian race had been dinosaurs.
Over time they evolved into smaller creatures,
though their eating habits—they were herbi¬
vores—had not changed. Now they wanted to
return to the surface (“top side,” he called it)
and reclaim their rightful roles as rulers of
Earth. J oy explained that no single individual
rules the surface, that there are many nations
and many leaders.

When she inquired as to his name, he
replied that her tongue would not be able to
pronounce it. He suggested that she make up
a name with which she felt comfortable. She
decided to call him “Leo,” telling him that
“Leo” means “king.” From then on, she ad¬
dressed him as King Leo.

King Leo wanted to know what love feels
like, since he and his people had no emo¬
tions—though such feelings are just now
starting to evolve in them. They have a reli¬
gion; they recognize the same Creator as sur¬
face humans do.

Joy met him again on August 14, 1999,
when she was taken into the kingdom again.
Leo told her that some of his subjects would

Kuran 145

like to live on the top again, though most
would be staying behind. Those who wanted
to go to the surface, however, were concerned
that human beings would not accept their ap¬
pearance. He told her that at present one and
a half million reptilians live beneath the earth.
According to Joyce’s friend Elliemiser, “He is
very congenial, likable and pleasant to com¬
municate with. . . . Now they are waiting to
find out what our response will be. . . . They
will not just suddenly pop up and frighten us”
(“The Reptilians,” 1999).

King Leo’s reptilians are not to be confused
with evil reptoids who are coming to Earth
from the Draco constellation. These beings
are violent meat-eaters who seek to destroy
humans with their advanced technology. The
reptilians, on the other hand, do not have
space travel, and their technology, while de¬
veloping, is still relatively primitive.

Further Reading

D’Light, Joy, and Elliemiser, 1999. “The Reptilians
and King Leo.” http://www.greatdreams.com/
reptlan/repleo.htm

Korton

Commander Korton is a well-loved, ubiqui¬
tous channeling entity. He is also a leading
light in the Ashtar Command, a close, trusted
associate of Ashtar. According to a common
belief, he heads the Ashtar Command Kor
Communications Base, located in an other¬
dimensional correlate to the planet Mars. His
task is to initiate contact with budding chan-
nelers and train them for their work. He also
supervises the Eagles, extraterrestrials who live
on Earth and pass as earthlings while per¬
forming missions for the Ashtar Command.
Some contactees have reported boarding his
ship in out-of-body states to attend briefings
in what looks like a large amphitheater.

One psychic who observed him in the
course of an interstellar conference describes
him as clad in a vanilla-colored robe. “His
eyes were deep-set,” the observer reported,
and blue in color. “He had a strong straight

nose, slightly high cheek bones, firm full
mouth. His hair was golden-blond . . . but his
beard was lighter. . . . There was a firmness
with this individual, but there was also a great
deal of warmth vibration also—the warmth of
love, of acceptance, of ‘you’re o.k.’”(Tuieta,
1986).

See Also: Ashtar; Channeling; Contactees

Further Reading

Tuella [pseudonym ofThelma B. Turrell], ed., 1989.
Ashtar: A Tribute. Third edition. Salt Lake City,
UT: Guardian Action Publications.

Tuieta, 1986. Project Alert. Fort Wayne, IN: Portals
of Light.

Kronin

On July 26, 1967, near Big Tujunga Canyon
in California, a man and a woman in a car
heard a disembodied voice speaking. It alerted
them to the imminent appearance of some¬
thing out of the ordinary. They spotted a
flash, then a disc-shaped UFO that landed
nearby. A tall, boneless, eyeless figure
emerged. He was, he said, Kronin, head of the
Kronian race. He was also “a space robot en¬
cased in a time capsule” (Keel, 1975).

When she arrived home, the woman, Maris
DeLong, took a phone call. It was from Kro¬
nin, the first of several in which he discussed
cosmic matters.

Further Reading

Keel, John A., 1975. The Mothman Prophecies. New
York: Saturday Review Press/E. P. Dutton and
Company.

Kuran

Kuran are a race of people whom an
actress/writer given the pseudonym “Jessica
Rolfe” claims to have met over a period of
years, beginning in her childhood. The
Kuran, who are described as beautiful,
tanned, golden-haired people who look
human, would materialize in her Miami
Beach, Florida, bedroom and teach her their
secrets. The Kuran communicate telepathi-
cally, though they do make vocal sounds for a
few simple sentiments such as “look there,”

146 Kurmos

“watch out,” and “wow.” They are among
twelve alien races who have visited Earth.
They have bases here, some off the coasts of
Florida and Argentina, one in Brazil’s Amazon
basin, and they have lived in them, unknown
to human beings, for millions of years. They
still do not understand humanity’s tendency
to be violent and prejudiced.

The Kuran told Rolfe that the human race
originally occupied a planet located between
Mars and Jupiter. They visited this planet just
before natural forces were set to destroy it, of¬
fering to remove the inhabitants to a suitable
place if they agreed to live by Kuran law. The
inhabitants refused, and the Kuran withdrew.
The residents of the doomed planet managed
to escape on their own. Some went to a
planet in the constellation of Pegasus, and the
other, to the Kuran’s displeasure, colonized
Earth and became our ancestors. Earth
proved an inhospitable place, not sufficiently
evolved to have achieved the cosmic har¬
monies that give rise to peaceable, well-
adjusted races. The new colonists, moreover,
interfered with Earth’s ecology, forcing its
previous, reigning, intelligent species from
the land into the oceans; humans now know
these beings as dolphins. Other alien races
who arrived were driven off or forced to live
in remote regions. The creatures humans call
Bigfoot or Sasquatch originally came from
outer space.

Over time, the new inhabitants forgot
their cosmic heritage and their true history.
Earth’s surface, once a single land mass sur¬
rounded by ocean (and recalled vaguely as the
lost continent of Mu), broke up, and the peo¬
ple were scattered. Cut off from one another,
they developed different cultures and differ¬
ent languages. Only an elite group called the
Magi preserved knowledge of the true past.
Each harbored ambitions for himself and col¬
lected followers. They used their knowledge
to abuse Earth’s natural energies and to har¬
ness atoms for destructive purposes. Dis¬
turbed by these developments, the Kuran re¬
turned to Earth and tried to reform its

inhabitants. With their followers, they con¬
structed the paradisiacal land of Atlantis,
only to have the Magi destroy it with atomic
bombs. The nuclear explosions changed
Earth’s landscape and climate and created the
continents we know today.

Even today a secret conflict continues be¬
tween the Kuran and the Magi. On occasion
the Kuran have tried to interfere in human af¬
fairs, each time with negative results. Myths
and legends of the gods of the ancient world
recount, in distorted form, previous Kuran ef¬
forts to lead us.

See Also: Atlantis; Lemuria

Further Reading

Gansberg, Judith M., and Alan L. Gansberg, 1980.
Direct Encounters: Personal Histories of UFO Ab -
ductees. New York: Walker and Company.

Kurmos

In March 1966, a mystically inclined Scots¬
man named R. Ogilvie (“Roc”) Crombie, vis¬
iting Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Gardens,
spotted a creature that looked half human and
half animal. Three feet tall, it had cloven
hoofs. It told Crombie that its name was Kur¬
mos. It was a nature spirit that helped trees to
grow.

Kurmos accompanied Crombie back to his
apartment, where it stayed for a short time.
On a subsequent trip to the garden, Crombie
called out to him, and Kurmos appeared. He
learned that in earlier ages Kurmos had been
the god Pan.

Further Reading

Ash, David, and Peter Hewitt, 1990. Science of the
Gods. Bath, England: Gateway Books.

Kwan Ti Laslo

Kwan Ti Laslo channels from the Blue Dia¬
mond Planet. This planet is not in orbit
around a sun (as planets are virtually by defi¬
nition) but rather is a sort of giant spacecraft
that travels all over the universe investigating
conditions there. The planet/spacecraft re¬
ports its findings to the Intergalactic Council.

Kwan Ti Laslo 147

In the mid-1970s, it made a brief visit to
Earths vicinity. Earthly astronomers mistook
the spacecraft for a comet.

Certain advanced human beings—Kwan Ti
Laslo mentioned former presidents Harry
Truman and John F. Kennedy specifically—
are allowed to come to the Blue Diamond
Planet and live there. The planet gives off blue

light from its many waterways and temperate
climate. There is no environmental pollution.
“All highly evolved planets have almost in¬
stantaneous cleansing of air and waters,”
Kwan Ti Laslo explains.

Further Reading

“The Blue Diamond Planet,” 1976. Other World Life
Review 1, 9 (November): 7.

Laan-Deeka and Sharanna

In February or early March 1967 a Puerto
Rican man named Lester Rosas received sev¬
eral telepathic messages from two Venusians,
Laan-Deeka and Sharanna. They promised
that they would meet with him face-to-face
one day soon.

On the evening of March 31, acting under
a strange compulsion, Rosas boarded a bus
and took it to the end of the line, which hap¬
pened to be along a coastal area. He kept
walking until he reached a deserted part of the
beach. By then it was pitch black, and he was
unsure about what he was doing there and for
what, or for whom, he was waiting. Then he
felt an odd sensation as a man who had shoul¬
der-length hair and was dressed in a close-fit¬
ting garment approached him. The man ex¬
tended his hand, but when Rosas tried to
shake his hand, the stranger withdrew it after
a mild pressing of palms. He said in Spanish,
“Yes, beloved Earth brother, I am Laan-
Deeka, of the planet Venus.” He went on to
state that Venusians had been keeping human
beings under surveillance since their primitive
origins and had also been living, unnoticed,
among them.

Laan-Deeka then commenced to discuss
reincarnation, saying that advanced earthlings
who obey nature’s laws are permitted to live

their next lives on spiritually developed plan¬
ets. In the universe, he said, most communi¬
cation, even interplanetary and interstellar
communication, occurs by telepathy. Human
beings are backward, in part, because they fail
to realize that telepathy is even possible.

The Venusian led Rosas to the other side of
a small nearby wall, where they witnessed the
materialization of a flying saucer. A door slid
open, and a woman emerged to engage Rosas
in a palm-to-palm Venusian handshake. “She
was so lovely that I was speechless for a mo¬
ment,” Rosas recalled. “Her hair was long and
fair, and she had a fantastic figure.... I esti¬
mated her measurements at 5'4" and 37-27-
35.” She introduced herself to Rosas as Sha¬
ranna, Laan-Deeka’s fiancee.

Though the couple looked to be no more
than twenty years old, their manner suggested
wiser, older persons. They had high foreheads
and slightly slanted eyes, his green, hers blue.
There was a musical sound to their voices, a
sense of joy in their speech and action.

The three entered the ship and flew off to
Venus, which proved to be the paradisiacal
world reported by other contactees. On their
way to the planet, Sharanna condemned the
war in Vietnam as “senseless and stupid—as
are all wars.” She also criticized those who re¬
fused to believe contact stories. If contactees’

149

150 Lady of Pluto

reports “are sometimes contradictory,” she
said, “it is with good reason. Your Earth people
are contacting space people from different
planets and different cultures, in different
stages of advancement.. . . Therefore the re¬
ports could hardly be the same” (Rosas, 1976).

See Also: Contactees

Further Reading

Rosas, Lester, 1976. “Visits from Venus.” Other
World Life Review Pt. I. 1, 8 (October): 4-5; Pt.
II. 1, 9 (December): 3-4.

Lady of Pluto

Kelvin Rowe, an acquaintance of such early
contactees as George Adamski and Truman
Bethurum, began hearing voices in his head in
early 1953. The voices were mostly indistinct,
and he was unsure of their meaning. On
March 9, 1954, while driving to San

Bernardino, California, the word “Pluto”
sounded inside his brain three times in succes¬
sion. Later that month, after further brief
messages from beings he identified as
Guardians from Space, he requested a direct,
in-person meeting. A voice replied that one
would happen, but he might not recognize it
when it did.

At the Giant Rock Interplanetary Space¬
craft Convention in the California desert the
following year on April 4, he kept company
with Truman Bethurum, whom he had
known four years before Bethurum began
claiming an association with the spacewoman
Aura Rhanes of Clarion. He met three young
people, a woman and two men, who looked
normal and were friendly. It was only later
that Rowe realized that they had said some¬
thing to him that they could not have known
about an earlier trip he had taken to see
Bethurum. Rowe wondered if they had been
space people, and soon a mental message con¬
firmed that they had been. The message was
from the young woman, whom he would call
the Lady of Pluto.

In a 1958 book, Rowe recounted the con¬
versation that followed. The Lady of Pluto
told him that contact with space people

would radically alter earthling science and hu¬
mankind’s beliefs on a range of issues. She also
said that earthwomen would be more recep¬
tive than earthmen, that by the time the open
contact occurred, women would hold posi¬
tions of authority in business and govern¬
ment. Their influence would ensure that the
changes took place without undue conflict
and destruction. She promised that in time,
when he was ready, he would be permitted to
board a spacecraft.

Mental communication with various space
people continued over the next months. Even¬
tually, a spaceman came to Rowe’s house late
one evening. The two had a short conversa¬
tion via telepathy before the extraterrestrial
disappeared into the night. Soon Rowe was
regularly seeing flying-saucer people. A week
after the first meeting, the same Space Brother
and a companion reappeared at his door. He
invited them in for a conversation about cos¬
mic and philosophical issues. According to
Rowe, “They were fine looking men, with
smooth, dark sun-tan complexions, and dark
hair styled in longer length than our modern
cuts” (Rowe, 1958). Three weeks of saucer
sightings and psychic contacts took place. The
communicators were a man and woman from
Jupiter: the Brother and Sister, Rowe called
them. He unexpectedly met them in the flesh
for a short while.

His next contact, a few weeks later in Janu¬
ary 1955, was with the Lady of Pluto, the first
time he had seen her since Giant Rock. She
was accompanied by a Space Brother, and
Rowe described her as “mettlesome and
lovely.” She stood five feet three inches tall,
wore a blouse, jacket, and slacks “in contrast¬
ing tones of a beautiful, pansy-blue, similar to
royal blue, and a shade of red-wine in a scin¬
tillating, deep intensity.” He was told that she
was the earthly equivalent of a captain on a
spacecraft. She also said that an asteroid was
passing dangerously close to Earth but that
the space people would make sure it did not
cause damage.

Some weeks later, Rowe met the Lady of
Pluto again, in the company of the Brother

Land beyond the Pole 151

and Sister of Jupiter. On this occasion he was
finally permitted to board a landed ship for a
few minutes. In due course, Rowe would fly,
more than once, into space onboard space¬
craft, sometimes with the Lady of Pluto, more
often with the Sister of Jupiter. “Some there
are who believe UFO’s are the greatest mys¬
tery of our century,” Rowe wrote. “I only
hope I have made it clear that there is no mys¬
tery connected with them.”

See Also: Adamski, George; Aura Rhanes; Bethu-
rum, Truman; Contactees

Further Reading

Rowe, Kelvin, 1958 .A Call at Dawn: A Message from
Our Brothers of the Planets Pluto and Jupiter. El
Monte, CA: Understanding Publishing Com¬
pany.

Land beyond the Pole

According to F. Amadeo Giannini, author of
Worlds beyond the Poles (1959), Admiral
Richard E. Byrd discovered a marvelous new
land when he flew 1,700 miles beyond the
North Pole during an expedition in 1947. Fie
saw ice-free lakes, mountains, and forests. Fie
even caught a glimpse of an enormous animal
walking through the underbrush. In 1956, on
a second expedition to the Arctic, he wit¬
nessed similar sights. Giannini claimed that
the U.S. government had sworn Byrd to si¬
lence after he first hinted of his discoveries in
his 1947 interviews with the New York Times.

Giannini, characterized as the “archetypal
crank” by one critic (Kafton-Minkel, 1989),
believed that Byrd’s alleged experience verified
his—Giannini’s—belief that the Earth is not
round but more or less spindle-shaped; at
each spindle point the surface, instead of end¬
ing, curves back overhead. The universe con¬
sists not of space but of vast land, “physical
continuity” he called it. What appear to hu¬
mans as stars, planets, galaxies, and other phe¬
nomena in the distant cosmos are only “glob¬
ular and isolated areas of a continuous and
unbroken outer sky surface.” FFis original in¬
spiration, he wrote, was a mystical vision he
experienced while strolling through a New
England forest one day in 1926.

Published as a vanity-press (that is, at the
author’s expense) book, Worlds beyond the
Poles would have passed quickly into oblivion
if not for the fact that Ray Palmer, editor of
Flying Saucers and promoter of the Shaver
Mystery, read the book after receiving a review
copy. Always looking for an issue to stir up his
readers, Palmer wrote of Byrd’s supposed se¬
cret flight to argue that the Earth is hollow
with giant holes at the poles. Anyone entering
the holes will encounter a hidden world har¬
boring an intelligent civilization that builds
and flies superaircraft that are called UFOs.
Palmer got the Byrd story from Giannini but
did not mention him, claiming that he had
gotten his information from “years of re¬
search” (Palmer, 1959). A number of readers
pointed out that the New York Times stories
about Byrd’s expedition did not quote him as
saying anything about forests or a giant beast;
even worse, in 1947 and 1956, Byrd was at
the South, not the North, Pole. Palmer was
forced to acknowledge that his sole source was
Giannini. Unapologetic, he went on to specu¬
late that perhaps Byrd had made a secret flight
to the Arctic in 1947; either that, or “a delib¬
erate effort was being made to build an edifice
which could be toppled IF AND WFFEN THE
TRUTH CAME OUT ABOUT THE SOUTH
POLE!” (Palmer, I960). And if neither of
these were true, the question of which pole
Byrd had flown over was moot since Byrd had
encountered a lush, green landscape where
none should have existed and that, in the end,
was all that mattered—notwithstanding the
nonexistence of any documentation that Byrd
had made any such claim in the first place.
Giannini soon weighed in to attack Palmer’s
hollow earth interpretation and to argue for a
secret Arctic expedition by Byrd in 1947,
which was followed by a suppression of his
discoveries.

In the 1970s, a Missouri-based organiza¬
tion called the International Society for a
Complete Earth, headed by retired marine
corps officer Tawani Shoush, who was also a
Modoc Indian, issued what it claimed was a
secret diary that Byrd kept during his 1947

152

I > JUNE, II370 • - - I .in r Nd K4

p"KO 75*

MVST€RrES«F THE SPACE ACE

FIRST PHOTOS OF THE HOLE AT THE ROLF !
Satellites ESSA - 3 and ESSA -7 Penetrate Cloud Cover’
Mariners Also Photograph Martian Polar Opening]

Cover of Flying Saucers magazine, June 1970, with a November 1968 satellite photo allegedly showing the hole in the
North Pole leading to the interior of hollow earth (Fortean Picture Library)

Lanello 153

North Pole expedition. Written in an ama¬
teurish, pulpy style, strikingly unlike the eru¬
dite prose found in Byrd’s undisputed pub¬
lished works, the diary has Byrd and his radio
operator passing over a green landscape and
spotting a “mammoth,” while the temperature
rises to seventy-four degrees. Soon the two
men spot three flying saucers with swastika in¬
signias (perhaps not coincidentally, Shoush’s
group held that the inner-earthers, a Teutonic
race known as the Arianni, favor the
swastika). The saucers take control of Byrd’s
plane and lead it to a city “pulsating with rain¬
bow hues of color.” There they meet the Ari¬
anni and engage in conversation with an aged,
wise man known as the Master. The Master
warns that human beings are insufficiently ad¬
vanced to be fooling with something as dan¬
gerous as atomic energy. The diary’s last entry,
supposedly written shortly before Byrd’s death
in 1957, says, “I have faithfully kept this mat¬
ter secret as directed all these years. It has been
completely against my values of moral right.”

Though unsupported by any evidence, the
story of Byrd’s flight beyond the pole became a
staple of hollow-earth literature. As late as
1993, Timothy Green Beckley was asking,
“Was it because of Admiral Byrd’s weird flight
into an unknown Polar land in 1947 that the
International Geophysical Year was conceived
in that year, and finally brought to fruition ten
years later, and is actually still going on? Did
his flight make it suddenly imperative to dis¬
cover the real nature of this planet we live on,
and solve the tremendous mysteries that unex¬
pectedly confronted us?” (Beckley, 1993).

Dennis G. Crenshaw, editor of The Hollow
Earth Insider Research Report, expresses a view
that is at once skeptical and conspiratorial. He
notes that when the diary quotes some of the
Master’s words, those words bear an unset¬
tling resemblance to those spoken by the
Dalai Lama of Shangri-La in the classic 1937
film Lost Horizon. He also bluntly charges that
Tawani Shoush and his group forged the
diary. Nonetheless, he sees a sinister hand in
all of this. Byrd’s polar expeditions were in the
service of the “paymasters” of the “Illuminati

and... a New World Order . . . John D.
Rocherfeller [sic] and his pals.” Moreover, Gi-
annini himself consciously served the conspir¬
acy. From uncertain evidence, Crenshaw con¬
cludes that Giannini’s family “owned the Bank
of Italy and the Bank of America.” He goes
on, “If, as my research seems to indicate, it is
the One Worlders’ plan to hide what is going
on at the earth’s poles, what better way to
cloud the water, so to speak, than to have one
of their own, an admitted member of an in¬
ternational banking family, toss in a contro¬
versy—such as this phony trip by Admiral
Byrd—to make hollow earthers appear as
ridiculous [?]” (Crenshaw, 1996).

Further Reading

Beckley, Timothy Green, ed., 1993. The Smoky God.
and Other Inner Earth Mysteries. New Brunswick,
NJ: Inner Light Publications.

Crenshaw, Dennis G., 1996. “The Missing Diary of
Admiral Byrd: Fact or Fiction?” The Hollow Earth
Insider Research Report A, 1: 8-15.

-, 1997. “Admiral Byrd’s 1939 Antarctic Ex¬
pedition and the Mysterious Snow Cruiser.” The
Hollow Earth Insider Research Report 4, 2: 4-16.

A Flight to the Land beyond the North Pole, or Is This
the Missing Secret Diary of Admiral Richard Evelyn
Byrd ? n.d. Houston, MO: International Society
for a Complete Earth.

Giannini, Amadeo F., 1959. Worlds beyond the Poles.
New York: Vantage Press.

Kafton-Minkel, Walter, 1989. Subterranean Worlds:
100,000 Years of Dragons, Dwarfs, the Dead, Lost
Races, and UFOs from inside the Earth. Port
Townsend, WA: Loompanics Unlimited.

Palmer, Ray, 1959. “Saucers from Earth! A Chal¬
lenge to Secrecy!” Flying Saucers (December):
8 - 21 .

-, 1960. “Editorial.” Flying Saucers (Febru¬
ary): 4, 29-34.

-, 1961. “‘Byrd Did Make North Pole Flight

in Feb., 1947!’—Giannini.” Flying Saucers (Feb¬
ruary): 4—11.

Lanello

In his most recent incarnation on Earth,
Lanello, an Ascended Master, was Mark L.
Prophet (1918-1973), married to Elizabeth
Clare Prophet of rhe Church Universal and
Triumphant. Since then, as Lanello, he has

154 Laskon

channeled through Prophet and Carolyn
Shearer.

Lanello first came to Earth thousands of
years ago from his native Venus after Sanat
Kumara—the brother of Sananda (Jesus) and
sometimes called Earth’s planetary spirit—de¬
termined to save the human race from de¬
stroying itself. Over the centuries Lanello
went through many incarnations, all in fulfill¬
ment of his earthly mission. In his lives, he
has been an Atlantean priest, Noah, Lot,
Amenhotep IV, Bodhidharma (founder of
Zen Buddhism), Aesop, Pericles, Mark the
Evangelist, Lancelot, Saladin, King Louis XIV
(the Sun King), Hiawatha, and Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow, among others.

Further Reading

“Ascended Master Lanello: ‘I Am Here and I Am
There! I Am Everywhere in the Consciousness of
God!’” n.d. http://www.ascension-research.org/
lanello.html.

Laskon

James Hill, who lived on a farm near Sey¬
mour, Missouri, experienced numerous fly¬
ing-saucer sightings and contacts with their
occupants, beginning in 1940. The contacts
occurred through his radio or via mental
telepathy. Eventually, a saucer landed, and as
Hill watched, the crew let out a large dog,
which went under a tree and gave birth to
pups. Hill kept one of the Venusian pups,
named Queenie. Hill’s principal contact over
time was with Brother Laskon, a member of
the Solar Tribunal on Saturn.

According to Laskon, Jesus is a frequent
space traveler who visits the many inhabited
planets. When he is in our system, he stays on
Mars and Saturn, but most of his time is spent
on Venus because of its loveliness. Laskon knew
Bucky, an earthman living on Venus and the
frequent contact of another Missouri contactee
(and friend of Hill), Buck Nelson. Laskon also
was able to confirm Chief Prank Buck Standing
Horse’s trip to the planet Oreon in the summer
of 1959. Saturn, which houses the Solar Tri¬
bunal, is a beautiful planet where greatly ad¬

vanced, spiritually wise beings reside. The
twelve Elder Ones who compose the tribunal
“are the names of all of the prophets in the bib¬
lical times,” Laskon has said (Dean, 1964). Like
Jesus, a senior member of the tribunal, they flew
to Earth in spaceships, spent their time here,
and then departed in the same way. Moses,
however, lives on Venus, where he serves on the
Supreme Council. John the Baptist returned to
Earth in the 1950s and even attended a con¬
tactee convention in Los Angeles in July 1959.

See Also: Andra-o-leeka and Mondra-o-leeka; Con-
tactees

Further Reading

Dean, John W, 1964. Flying Saucers and the Scrip -
tures. New York: Vantage Press.

Lazaris

Lazaris first spoke to Jach Pursel, a Plorida re¬
gional insurance supervisor with no interest in
the New Age or occult, after his wife, Peny,
urged him to meditate as a way of easing job-
related stress. Instead of meditating, Pursel fell
asleep. Soon an oddly accented voice was
speaking through him. Though startled and
even frightened, Peny grabbed pen and paper
and started asking questions. The entity said
its name was “Lazaris.”

The channeling continued for years with
Lazaris relating a philosophy rather like that
associated with other popular channeled enti¬
ties of the period, including Ramtha and Seth.
In this philosophy, humans are evolving spiri¬
tual beings who need to gain access to the di¬
vine intelligence that is within each of them.

Lazaris became hugely popular, and at the
peak of Lazaris’s fame on the New Age circuit,
Pursel was channeling as much as forty hours a
week, with Peny—from whom he was now di¬
vorced—and her new husband managing the
business. Lazaris, who always used the plural
pronoun when speaking, told writer Jon Klimo,
“We are always in a state of expansion. We have
no boundary. We have no edge of who we are,
and yet we know who we are. We know where
we begin and end, although there is no
form.. . . We have always been and we will al-

Lemuria 155

ways be; and therefore, we are always constantly
exploring our awareness, gathering data, gather¬
ing insight, gathering vibration and internaliz¬
ing that vibration. We are always everywhere
and nowhere simultaneously” (Klimo, 1987).

See Also: Channeling; Ramtha; Seth
Further Reading

Klimo, Jon, 1987. Channeling: Investigations on Re -
ceiving Information from Paranormal Sources. Los
Angeles: J. P. Tarcher.

Martin, Katherine, 1987. “The Voice of Lazaris.”

New Realities 7, 6 (July/August): 26-33.

Pursel, Jach, 1987. Lazaris, The Sacred Journey: You
and Your Higher Self. Beverly Hills, CA: Concept
Synergy.

-, 1988. Lazaris Interviews. Two volumes.

Beverly Hills, CA: Concept Synergy.

Lemuria

Lemuria was the invention of British zoolo¬
gist Philip L. Schattler, who conceived of it as
an Indian Ocean land bridge connecting

Madagascar and extreme southern India.
Schattler, who was researching animal popu¬
lations, sought to explain why these two
widely separated locations shared many of the
same flora and fauna. (In the twentieth cen¬
tury, continental drift theory rendered Schat-
tler’s hypothesis obsolete.) He called the pos¬
tulated land bridge “Lemuria,” after the
lemurs, animals that the two areas shared in
common. Before long, however, occultists
and mystics would incorporate the concept of
Lemuria—now conceived of as a lost conti¬
nent in the Pacific Ocean—into their own al¬
ternative histories.

For a time, however, Lemuria remained a
scientifically respectable hypothesis. One
major champion, German evolutionary biolo¬
gist Ernst Haeckel, speculated that Homo sapi -
ens originated on Lemuria, though that could
not be proved because any remains had sunk
to the bottom of the sea along with the land

“I Remember
Lemuria*”

By KiCFlAfll} EiflAVER
cud RAY PALMES

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A science fiction novella about Lemuria by Richard S. Shaver and Ray Palmer in Amazing Stories, March 1945 (Fortean
Picture Library)

156 Lemuria

bridge. Others theorized that Lemuria was
just part of a vast continent, called Gond-
wanaland, which had circled most of the
Southern Hemisphere, leaving only a patch of
the Pacific Ocean uncovered. None of the sci¬
entists argued that either Lemuria or Gond-
wanaland had survived into historical time.

Lemuria entered the occult tradition
through Helene Petrovna Blavatsky, founder
of Theosophy. In The Secret Doctrine (1889),
Blavatsky wrote that the present human race
evolved through a series of “root races.” The
third root race lived on Lemuria. These beings
had three eyes, one in the back of the head,
and were egg-laying hermaphrodites (possess¬
ing attributes of both sexes); some had four
arms. Aside from these features, they were
generally apelike in appearance.

Other occult writers went on to create their
own Lemurians. Through “astral clairvoy¬
ance” the English theosophist W. Scott-Elliot
learned that it was on Lemuria that human
beings entered physical bodies. The original
Lemurians were twelve to fifteen feet tall, had
flat faces and muzzles, and no foreheads.
Their eyes were set so far apart that their vi¬
sion extended sideways, and they had a third
eye behind their heads. Eventually, these be¬
ings began to practice sex, and the Lhas, spirit
entities who were to inhabit the bodies and
guide them through evolution, were so re¬
pulsed that they refused their duty. The Lords
of the Flame, advanced Venusians, took over
and guided the Lemurians into a more human
and spiritual state. During the Mesozoic era
Lemuria began to break up, and one of its
peninsulas became Atlantis.

In the late nineteenth century, archaeolo¬
gist Augustus Le Plongeon, working in the
Yucatan, believed he had discovered how to
translate Mayan hieroglyphics. His transla¬
tions, which other scholars judged dubious,
led him to believe that he had uncovered evi¬
dence of a lost civilization known as Mu. He
assumed Mu to be Atlantis. After his death,
however, his friend James Churchward, who
had inherited Le Plungeon’s papers, argued
that Mu, “the motherland of man,” had been

in the South Pacific, not in the Atlantic. Mu
housed a white population of some sixty-four
million souls who had built great cities and
worshipped the sun. Mu sank beneath the sea
ten thousand years ago. Churchward claimed
to have learned about Mu from tablets written
in the dead Naacal language. He had been
given access to them, he said, while serving in
India in the Bengal Lancers. Churchward
wrote about his “findings” in four books, be¬
ginning with The Lost Continent of Mu
(1926). His failure to produce any evidence
that the Naacal tablets existed outside his
imagination sparked hoax charges that
Churchward never successfully refuted.

Soon Mu and Lemuria were assumed to be
the same place, and thus Lemuria became a
Pacific equivalent to the Atlantic’s Atlantis. In
the early years of the twentieth century, specu¬
lation grew that California was a surviving
fragment of Lemuria. A popular occult leg¬
end, apparently originating in a 1908 article
in The Overland Monthly, held—and still
holds—that a surviving Lemurian colony lives
inside Mount Shasta, on the California-Ore-
gon border. According to Lemuria: The Lost
Continent of the Pacific (1931), by H. Spencer
Lewis (writing as Wishar S. Cerve), when
Lemuria broke up, a California-sized part of it
crashed into North Americas west coast and
attached itself. In 1936, Robert Stelle of
Chicago founded the Lemurian Fellowship,
based on his channeled messages from
Lemurians living inside Mount Shasta. In two
books published between 1940 and 1952,
Stelle depicted Lemuria as an enormous land
mass and a lost paradise.

In the mid-1940s, the Ziff-Davis science-
fiction magazines Amazing Stories and Fantas -
tic Adventures ran a series of stories and al¬
legedly factual articles based in part on
Richard S. Shaver’s “memories” of life in
Lemuria, some of whose inhabitants still re¬
side under the earth. Most have gone mad and
use the advanced technology available to them
to torment surface-dwellers.

Lemuria was incorporated into the flying
saucer-based alternative realities proposed by

Lethbridge’s aeronauts 157

the contactees and channelers who came
along in the late 1940s and 1950s amid popu¬
lar speculation about visitation from other
planets. The Pacific lost continent played a
prominent role in George Hunt Williamson’s
speculative books Other Tongues—Other Flesh
(1953), Secret Places of the Lion (1958), and
Road in the Sky (1959), which laid out an an¬
cient history in which Lemurians and At-
lanteans interacted freely with a variety of ex¬
traterrestrial races.

Now an assumed reality in just about any
metaphysical, New Age, hollow earth, or
saucerian worldview, Lemuria sooner or later
enters just about any discussion predicated on
the assumption that everything humans think
they know about the ancient history of Earth
and the human race is wrong.

See Also: Atlantis; Contactees; Hollow earth; Mount
Shasta; Shaver mystery; Williamson, George
Hunt

Further Reading

Blavatsky, Helene P., 1889. The Secret Doctrine. Two
volumes. London: Theosophical Publishing
Company.

Churchward, James, 1926. The Lost Continent of
Mu. New York: Ives Washburn.

De Camp, L. Sprague, 1970. Lost Continents: The At -
lantis Theme in History, Science, and Literature.
New York: Dover Publications.

Kafton-Minkel, Walter, 1989. Subterranean Worlds:
100,000 Years of Dragons, Dwafs, the Dead, Lost
Races and UFOs from inside the Earth. Port
Townsend, WA: Loompanics Unlimited.

Scott-Elliot, W., 1925. The Story of Atlantis and the
Lost Lemuria. London: Theosophical Publishing
House.

Shaver, Richard S., 1945. “I Remember Lemuria!”
Amazing Stories 19, 1 (March): 12-70.

Williamson, George Hunt, 1953. Other Tongues —
Other Flesh. Amherst, WI: Amherst Press.

-, 1958. Secret Places of the Lion. London:

Neville Spearman.

-, 1959. Road in the Sky. London: Neville

Spearman.

Lethbridge’s aeronauts

In the spring of 1909, the British Isles were
inundated with sightings of enigmatic objects
that some people called “airships.” Popular
and official opinion concurred that German

spies were involved, though it is now known
that no such German surveillance was occur¬
ring or, for that matter, was even technically
achievable. One man claimed to have seen an
airship land and to have observed its crew.

Press accounts identify this witness as C.
Lethbridge, described in a press account as
“an elderly man, of quiet demeanor, [who]
did not strike one as given to romancing.”
During the winter, Lethbridge was a dock
worker in Cardiff. In the warmer months, he
performed puppet shows in the towns and
villages of Wales. Around 11 on the evening
of May 18, returning home across remote
Caerphilly Mountain, he rounded a bend at
the summit and was taken aback to see some¬
thing unusual lying along the side of the
road. His first impression was that it was
“some big bird.” Standing next to it were two
tall men clad in heavy fur coats and tight-fit¬
ting fur caps. Their bearing and smart ap¬
pearance led him to think of them as military
officers. They were working at something,
but Lethbridge was not close enough to see
what it was.

When he got within twenty to thirty yards
of them, they reacted to the rattle of his
spring-cart and jumped up as if startled. They
“jabbered furiously to each other in a strange
lingo—Welsh or something else; it was cer¬
tainly not English.” Retrieving something on
the ground, they ran to a carriage underneath
the object, which then ascended in a zigzag
motion. Two lights on its side suddenly came
on. Emitting an “awful noise,” the craft flew
higher and set off in the direction of Cardiff.

After Lethbridge told his story in that city,
investigators rushed to the site. If not for that
circumstance, the episode would have the ap¬
pearance of an early close encounter of the
third kind. Indeed, it is published in some
UPO literature as just that. Most accounts
leave out what the investigators found at the
site: a variety of artifacts including parts of let¬
ters, a spare part for a tire valve, papier-mache
wads, blue paper containing figures and let¬
ters, and clippings about airships. All of this
suggests, or at least seems intended to convey,

158 Li Sung

the notion that the airship crew consisted of
foreign spies.

Though nothing is known about the inci¬
dent beyond what appears in Welsh and En¬
glish newspapers of the period, the story
seems suspect. The first chronicler of the
UFO phenomenon, Charles Fort, remarked
that “anybody else [who] wants to think that
these foreigners were explorers from Mars or
the moon” (Fort, 1941) was free to do so, but
he himself suspected a hoax. Because no for¬
eign spies were engaged in aerial surveillance
of Britain in 1909, it is hard to imagine an¬
other explanation.

Coincidentally or otherwise, during a wave
of UFO reports in France in the fall of 1954,
a railroad worker at Monlucon claimed that
one evening he encountered a tube-shaped
craft. Outside it stood a man dressed in what
looked like a long, hairy overcoat. When the
witness addressed the figure, the latter re¬
sponded in an unknown language. The wit¬
ness left the scene to report it to his supervi¬
sor, but when the two returned, the UFO and
the hairy-coated figure were gone.

See Also: Close encounters of the third kind

Further Reading

Fort, Charles, 1941. The Books of Charles Fort. New
York: Henry Holt and Company.

Grove, Carl, 1971. “The Airship Wave of 1909.”
Flying Saucer Review 17, 1 (January/February):
17-19.

Vallee, Jacques, 1974. “The Pattern behind the UFO
Landings.” In Charles Bowen, ed. The Hu -
manoids, 27-76. London: Futura Publications.

Li Sung

Li Sung, said to be the spirit of a village
philosopher who lived in northern China in
the eighth century, channeled through Alan
Vaughan. Vaughan, a longtime writer on psy¬
chic phenomena, first experienced Li Sung in
1983, but sixteen years earlier, three British
mediums had told him he would be commu¬
nicating with this Chinese spirit. Vaughan
said he did not believe them. But one day,
while he was teaching at a psychic seminar in
Sedona, Arizona, a couple asked him—he was

then editing a publication called Reincarna -
tion Report —if he could divine their past lives.

“Suddenly a tremendous energy flooded
over the top of my head,” he would recall. “It
was like watching a dream, as the Chinese en¬
tity Li Sung began to speak through me. He
gave them some detailed information about
past lives and how they fit into their present life
paths. For me, it was the beginning of an en¬
largement of consciousness” (Shepard, 1991).

Vaughan went on to channel Li Sung in
public on many occasions. Vaughan contends
that anyone can channel if he or she wants to.
It is, he asserts, as easy as learning how to
whistle.

See Also: Channeling

Further Reading

Klimo, Jon, 1987. Channeling: Investigations on Re -
ceiving Information from Paranormal Sources. Los
Angeles: Jeremy P Tarcher.

Shepard, Leslie A., 1991. Encyclopedia of Occultism
and Parapsychology: A Compendium of Informa -
tion on the Occidt Sciences, Magic, Demonology,
Superstitions, Spiritism, Mysticism, Metaphysics,
Psychical Science, and Parapsychology, with Bio -
graphical and Bibliographical Notes and Compre -
hensive Indexes. Third edition. Detroit, MI: Gale
Research.

Linn-Erri

Linn-Erri introduced herself to Robert P. Re-
naud one night in July 1961. A Pittsfield,
Massachusetts, ham-radio buff and General
Electric technician, Renaud heard beeping
sounds from his radio and then heard a lovely
female voice asking him to stay on the fre¬
quency for a while. She told him, “I am called
Linn-Erri, and my associates and I come from
the planet Korendor. We are speaking to you
from our spaceship many miles above your
earth” (Clark, 1986). She and her fellow Ko-
rendorians had chosen to contact him because
they knew of his interest in UFOs, world
peace, and the future of humankind. After
Linn-Erri introduced him to other crewmem¬
bers, she explained how Renaud could con¬
struct a transmitter for easy reception of fu¬
ture messages from space. Later that year, the
space people helped him convert a television

Luno 159

set to receive their transmissions. For the first
time, he saw the beautiful Linn-Erri and was
shocked to learn that she was seventy-four
Earth years old.

In due course, Renaud was meeting per¬
sonally with the Korendorians, riding in their
ships, and learning their science and philoso¬
phy, which was essentially indistinguishable in
its essentials from that widely recounted in
saucerian literature. He stayed away from the
contactee lecture and convention circuit and
confined his public activities to a series of arti¬
cles about his alleged experiences in a meta¬
physically oriented saucer magazine. He also
produced dubious-looking photographs of
supposed spacecraft.

To outward appearances, nothing distin¬
guished Renaud from many others making
outlandish and not very believable claims.
Still, ufologist Allan Grise, an interested but
highly skeptical observer of the contactee
scene, found Renaud a fascinating and enig¬
matic figure. “If Renaud was engaged in
fraud,” he said years later, “it was preposter¬
ous, unrewarding fraud.”

Grise visited Renaud at his home and
found, as the contactee’s writings asserted, a
basement room full of electronic equipment,
including the television set and the short-wave
radio over which the communications sup¬
posedly were effected. Grise, an engineer by
profession and ham-radio buff by avocation,
found that “everything seemed to make sense.
The circuits were all appropriate to extend the
receiving range.” In other words, if he was
getting messages from an aerial source, he had
the equipment with which to receive them.

More remarkable, however, were the books
Renaud was writing on Korendorian life and
philosophy. There were a dozen or so of them,
all single-spaced, each five hundred to six
hundred pages long. There were, so far as
Grise could discern from studying their con¬
tents, no typographical errors. But that was
not all.

“When he wrote those books,” Grise re¬
called, “it was like his hands belonged to
someone else. Hed sit there in front of his

typewriter and pay no attention to what was
coming out of him. He’d be on the phone or
talking with me, and all the while his hands
are going, producing this perfectly typed,
clearly written stuff on alien philosophy. It
was just unbelievable.” Renaud seemed singu¬
larly uninterested in promoting himself and
volunteered nothing, though he would answer
questions.

Renaud also had a large collection of tapes
allegedly of his space communications. Grise
listened to some of them and heard what was
supposed to be the voice of Linn-Erri. The
recordings, of excellent quality, carried a voice
with “a kind of hesitancy in speech patterns
suggesting a foreign person doing well in En¬
glish. It had a singsong, melodious quality.”

Soon afterward, Renaud broke off his brief
association with Grise. He ceased all contact
activities, telling his publisher that he had
done his part and wanted no more of it. By
the end of the 1960s, Renaud had dropped
out of sight. In 1985, Renaud still puzzled
Grise. “Something quite out of the normal
was going on,” he said. “Whatever it was.”

See Also: Contactees

Further Reading

Clark, Jerome, 1986. “Waiting for the Space Broth¬
ers.” Fate Pt. I. 39, 3 (March): 47-54; Pt. II. 39,
4 (April): 81-87; Pt. III. 39, 5 (May): 68-76.

Luno

Luno was one of a number of Space Brothers
who communicated through Lorraine Darr of
Rochester, Minnesota. In the mid-1970s, she
and her husband, Victor, performed psychic
healing under the direction of friendly extra¬
terrestrials whom the couple occasionally
glimpsed in apparitional form. Vic also un¬
derwent out-of-body trips that took him into
spaceships. Sometimes they took him to
Venus, where he used his healing talents to
cure ailing natives. The couple also believed
that while in meditative states they entered
other dimensions. Other Space Brothers who
helped the Darrs included Becovol, Norbol,
Muello, Maynell, and Julo.

160 Lyrans

Further Reading

Steiger, Brad, 1976. Gods of Aquarius: UFOs and the
Transformation of Man. New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich.

Lyrans

According to the channeling entity Germane,
human ancestors interacted with Lyrans,
members of an extraterrestrial race that func¬
tioned as stern, authoritarian teachers. Early
humans both revered and feared them. They
were sturdy, large, light-skinned people. Their
symbols were birds, cats, and the phoenix.
The phoenix image was an invention of theirs,
intended to symbolize the indestructibility of
their empire. They did not hold earthlings in
high regard and hoped that the Great Flood

would destroy all of them, so that the Lyrans
could start over with a new, improved civiliza¬
tion. Other, more kindly disposed extraterres¬
trials, however, warned Noah and others, and
humanity was saved.

Travel to Earth from the Lyran system took
generations. Thus, once the Lyrans arrived
here, they could never leave. They lost all con¬
tact with their home world and eventually in¬
termarried with native earthlings. Back on
Lyra the inhabitants continued to evolve and
advance into highly spiritual beings, but their
cousins stranded on Earth did not.

Further Reading

Royal, Lyssa, 1994. “ET Civilizations—Germane.”
http://www.lemuria.net/article-et-civilizations.
html.

Mafu

Mafu channeled through Penny Torres of Los
Angeles, beginning in 1986. Thirty-two thou¬
sand years old, Mafu claimed to have passed
through seventeen incarnations on Earth. He
taught that God is in everything and everyone,
and everything and everyone is in God. Beyond
that, he championed a macrobiotic diet, medi¬
tation, and the adoption of a spiritual path.

In 1989, Torres, now Penny Torres Rubin,
made a pilgrimage to Hardiwar, India, in the
Himalayan foothills. She refashioned herself
with the title and name of Swami Para-
mananda Saraswatti. Back in the United
States she created the Foundation for the Re¬
alization of Inner Divinity and a subsidiary,
the Center for God Realization. Through
these she has disseminated Mafu’s teachings.

For a time Mafu was among the most pop¬
ular channeling entities on the New Age scene
of the late 1980s and early 1990s. He was
sometimes said to be little more than a clone
of the famous Ramtha, channeled by the con¬
troversial J. Z. Knight, though at one point
Torres Rubin charged that Ramtha was noth¬
ing more than a fraud.

Further Reading

“Interview: Penny Torres on Mafu,” 1986/1987. Life
Times 1, 2 (Winter): 74-79.

L’Ecuyer, Michele, 1986/1987. “Mafu.” Life Times 1,
2 (Winter): 80-82.

Melton, J. Gordon, 1996. Encyclopedia of American
Religions. Detroit, MI: Gale Research.

Magonia

The concept of Magonia entered the literature
of ufology in a 1964 issue of England’s Flying
Saucer Review. Ancient-astronaut theorist
W. R. Drake, author of a series of pieces high¬
lighting what he judged to be evidence of ex¬
traterrestrial visitation, briefly cited a ninth-
century French account of a “ship in clouds”
from a place called “Magonia.” A slightly
longer version appeared in Jacques Vallee’s
Passport to Magonia (1969), in which Yallee
went on to turn “Magonia” into the unknown
realm from which many unexplained phe¬
nomena—everything from elves to demons to
UFO humanoids—emerge. He defined Mag¬
onia as “a sort of parallel universe, which co¬
exists with our own. It is made visible and
tangible only to selected people” (Vallee,
1969). In his view, each culture experiences
Magonia in a fashion that conforms to its own
expectations concerning supernatural encoun¬
ters. Thus, rural Ireland experiences fairies,
while Space Age America has its ostensible ex¬
traterrestrials. Vallee did not mean to imply

161

162 Marian apparitions

that these experiences were purely hallucina¬
tory; he was convinced of an underlying but
impenetrable reality forever disguised under
many masks. A Bridsh magazine, still pub¬
lished, named itself Magonia after Yallee’s
book, though the magazine rejects paranor¬
mal explanations of such phenomena.

The Magonia story appeared originally in a
circa 833 manuscript written in Latin by Ago-
bard (779-840), the Archbishop of Lyons.
The title in English is “Book Against False
Opinions Concerning Hail and Thunder.”
Agobard was fiercely hostile to all non-Chris¬
tian beliefs. One that particularly infuriated
him was the “mad and blind” belief that
“there exists a certain region called Magonia,
from which ships, navigating on clouds, set
sail to transport back to this same region the
fruits of the earth ruined by hail and de¬
stroyed by the storm.” Agobard tells of “sev¬
eral of these senseless fools” who held in cus¬
tody “three men and one woman, who they
said had fallen from these ships.” The prison¬
ers were brought in front of an assembly to be
stoned to death, but the archbishop managed
to save their lives, after “the truth finally tri¬
umphed” and he had shown up the absurdity
of the charges (Brodu, 1995).

In a critical analysis of the legend, French
anomalist Jean-Fouis Brodu reviewed Mago-
nia’s various uses over the centuries as well as
the embellishments that attached themselves
to it. In the UFO age, the sketchy account
was variously represented as a landing with
aliens or an early abduction case. Some ac¬
counts twisted details and reported that the
captives had been stoned to death, Agobard’s
explicit words to the contrary. Surveying the
scholarly literature on the Magonian tales,
Brodu argues that Agobard’s account makes
no sense outside the context of the period,
which included the belief that the Earth is flat
and that ships can sail through cloud seas.
“Magonia” may be a corruption of “Magoni-
anus,” meaning “from Port-Mahon,” a once-
flourishing harbor on the Balearic island of
Minorca.

See Also: Abductions by UFOs; Fairies encountered

Further Reading

Brodu, Jean-Louis, 1995. “Magonia: A Re-evalua-
tion.” In Steve Moore, ed. Fortean Studies: Volume
2, 198-215. London: John Brown Publishing.

Drake, W. R., 1964. “Spacemen in the Middle
Ages.” Flying Saucer Review 10, 3 (May/June):
11-13.

Vallee, Jacques, 1969. Passport to Magonia: From
Folklore to Flying Saucers. Chicago: Henry Regn-
ery Company.

Marian apparitions

Visions of the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVM)
have been reported since at least the third cen¬
tury of the Christian era. The first for which
there is anything approximating detailed
knowledge dates back to 1061 when the BVM
provided a vision of Christ’s residence in
Nazareth and directed the witness, the lady of
the manor in Walsingham, Norfolk, to see
that a precise copy was constructed on the
spot. A few visions are well known, and the
Roman Catholic Church has granted official
recognition to a small number, though it has
rejected the vast majority as delusional. BVM
encounters are far from rare. Every year sev¬
eral occur around the world. With very few
exceptions, the primary witnesses are
Catholics, and usually devout followers of the
faith. Sometimes other supernatural phenom¬
ena accompany the BVM’s manifestation and
become, to the faithful, veridical evidence that
the event was real.

Undoubtedly the most spectacular such
case took place in Fatima, Portugal, in 1917.
The incident is extraordinarily complicated.
What follows is a highly abbreviated account.

Around noon on May 13, three children,
two girls and a boy, tending sheep, saw a flash
of light and observed a brilliantly illuminated
figure of a woman standing amid the branches
of an oak tree. The apparition announced that
she was from heaven and would return six
times, on each occasion on the thirteenth of
each succeeding month. On the last visitation
in October, she would tell them who she was
and why she had come. Soon word spread,
and by June 13 some sixty persons accompa-

Marian apparitions 163

The Vision of Our Lady of Fatima (Fortean Picture
Library)

nied the children. Though the BVM ap¬
peared, no one but the children saw her, and
the communication, which predicted the
deaths of the two younger children in the near
future (they died in 1919 and 1920), occurred
through the oldest child, Lucia de Santos,
who was told that she would live long as a
witness to the living reality of Mary.

Ever larger groups followed the children to
the site in the succeeding months. In August,
the BVM asked that a chapel be built at the
site of her appearances. On September 13,
some members of the crowd, estimated to be
between twenty-five and thirty thousand per¬
sons, reported seeing the passage from east to
west of a mysterious globe-shaped light. A
month later, the number of pilgrims had
swelled to seventy thousand. The BVM—as

always, visible only to the children—appeared
at noon during a blinding rainstorm. The
three saw her, Joseph, and the child Jesus
standing in the sky near the sun. Meanwhile,
some in the crowd saw, or thought they saw,
the sun begin to “dance” dramatically through
the clouds, spinning and shooting colors, as
the rain let up.

In the 1940s, in her memoirs, Lucia de
Santos, since 1925 a Carmelite nun, re¬
vealed two of three “secrets” the BVM had
imparted to her. Although open to other in¬
terpretations, the prophecies were thought
by most believers to refer to the end of
World War I and the start of World War II
and to the end of Soviet Communism and
the conversion of the Russians to Catholi¬
cism. The third secret was sent to the Vati¬
can in the 1950s. It became the focus of
much speculation, most of it alleging that it
predicted a third world war. In May 2000,
however, as Pope John Paul II embarked on
a pilgrimage to Fatima, during which he
spoke with the ninety-three-year-old Lucia,
the Vatican released the prophecy, which he
believed predicted the 1981 assassination at¬
tempt on the pope in St. Peter’s Square—an
interpretation disputed by others.

The first New World appearance of the
BVM is said to have taken place five miles
north of Mexico City just after dawn on De¬
cember 9, 1531. A fifty-seven-year-old Aztec
Indian, Juan Diego, was racing along a hill¬
side to get to mass in a nearby village. Passing
a site at the foot of a hill called Tepeyac, which
earlier had housed a temple to the Aztec
Mother Goddess, he heard a feminine voice
calling his name. He saw a young woman,
looking about fourteen years old and having
Mexican features, who asked that a chapel be
built at the site. She also told him that he
should alert the bishop in Mexico City imme¬
diately. With some difficulty, he got an audi¬
ence with the bishop, who was skeptical.
Diego returned to report his failure to the
BVM, who was waiting for him. She in¬
structed him to return the next day. This time
the bishop asked for a sign.

164 Marian apparitions

That same day, Diego’s uncle, who was se¬
riously ill, had a vision of the BYM and was
cured. Meanwhile, Diego repeated the
bishops request to the apparition. She told
him to pick roses from the hillside (though
they should have been out of season). He was
instructed to wrap them in his long outer cape
(known as a tilma) and to take them to the
bishop. When he did so, he unrolled the tilma
and was as shocked as the bishop and his asso¬
ciates when the cape turned out to contain a
full-color image of the BVM. To this day the
tilma is displayed in a Mexico City church,
where thousands of pilgrims come to see it
every year.

To skeptics, the figure gives every indica¬
tion of having been painted on the cloth.
They also point out that the figure has more
to do with conventional iconography of the
period than with otherworldly manifesta¬
tion. They have also raised questions about
the provenance of Juan Diego’s story, sug¬
gesting it is based on an earlier Spanish leg¬
end. Still, whatever the truth, the story and
the image have proved equally durable and
to the faithful remain powerful symbols of
Mary’s continuing interest in the Church
and its believers.

A third major BYM appearance occurred at
Knock, a small village in western Ireland’s
County Mayo, in 1879. A commission of in¬
quiry set up by John McHale, the Archbishop
of Tuam, investigated it soon afterward. On
the evening of August 21, Mary Beirne, a mid¬
dle-aged housekeeper for the local priest, was
walking by the chapel when she was surprised
to see three “beautiful” figures, one resembling
the BVM, the other St. Joseph, the third a
bishop, standing motionlessly near an altar. A
white light surrounded them. She thought
someone had put on a display of statues. She
went to a friend’s house and stayed for half an
hour. When she and her friend Mary
McLoughlin were on their way back to the
priest’s house, her friend remarked on the fig¬
ures. She ran off to notify relatives. Mean¬
while, Beirne watched the scene carefully, later
providing this description to investigators:

I beheld . . . not only the three figures, but an
altar further on the left of the figure of the
Blessed Virgin Mary, and to the left of the
bishop and above the altar a lamb about the
size of that which is five weeks old. Behind the
lamb appeared the cross; it was a bit away from
the lamb, while the latter stood in front from
it, and not resting on the wood of the cross.
Around the lamb a number of gold-like stars
appeared in the form of a halo. This altar was
placed right under the window of the gable
and more to the east of the figures, all, of
course, outside the church at Knock. (Mc¬
Clure, 1983)

The other witnesses came to the scene and
observed the motionless figures. Though it
was raining all the while, they would report,
the ground around the figures remained dry.
Yet when Mary Beirne’s mother approached
to kiss the BVM’s feet, she felt nothing. She
could see the figures, but she could not touch
them. Eventually, the figures faded away. All
in all, at least fifteen persons saw them.
Knock is now a major destination for Marian
pilgrims.

The tradition of Marian apparitions has
continued unabated into modern times. In
1999, on the eve of the millennium, visionar¬
ies were encountering the BVM in Germany,
New Hampshire, Illinois, El Salvador, On¬
tario, and elsewhere. Most prophecies related
with these visions asserted that nuclear war¬
fare would erupt before the end of the year.
During the conflict for custody of six-year-old
Cuban refugee Elian Gonzalez, some of Elian’s
Miami relatives claimed to have seen the
BVM, manifesting, they asserted, to show her
support for their belief that the boy should be
kept in their custody instead of his Cuban fa¬
ther’s.

Secular treatments of BVM apparitions
range from conventional views—for example,
that hysteria, hoax, and hallucination underlie
the accounts—to more expansive theories.
The sightings at Fatima, for example, figure in
some UFO literature, in which they are said
to be encounters with an alien being disguised
as or mistaken for the BVM. The late D. Scott

Mark 165

Rogo, a writer and researcher interested in a
wide range of anomalous phenomena, treated
BYM and comparable religious miracles as
parapsychological phenomena.

Further Reading

Dash, Mike, 1997. Borderlands. London: Heinemann.

Delaney, John J., ed., 1960. A Woman Clothed with
the Sun: Eight Great Appearances of Our Lady in
Modern Times. Garden City, NY: Hanover
House.

McClure, Kevin, 1983. The EvidenceforVisions of the
Virgin Mary. Wellingborough, Northampton¬
shire, England: Aquarian Press.

Nickell, Joe, with John F. Fischer, 1988. Secrets of the
Supernatural: Investigating the World’s Occult Mys -
teries. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.

Rogo, D. Scott, 1982. Miracles: A Parascientific In -
quiry into Wondrous Phenomena. New York: Dial
Press.

Van Meter, David, 1999. “Digest of Marian Appari¬
tions and Catholic Apocalypticism.” http://mem-
bers.aol.com/UticaCW/Mar-Review.html.

Mark

Mark may or may not be among the extrater¬
restrials with whom George Adamski allegedly
interacted. He figures in an unusually interest¬
ing contact claim made by a woman identified
only as “Joelle” and known to British ufologist
Timothy Good, who told her story for the
first time in a 1998 book. Joelle, a British
woman of Russian background, never publi¬
cized her reported experiences, which oc¬
curred between 1963 and 1964, and they did
not see print until after her death.

Joelle told Good that the contacts were initi¬
ated when she was doing a house-to-house
marketing survey in the Sheffield area in Sep¬
tember 1963. At one house she noticed a vari¬
ety of gadgets, none of which she recognized as
commercially available. The woman (given the
pseudonym “Rosamund”) whom she was inter¬
viewing said her husband (“Jack”) was a scien¬
tist, inventor, and ham-radio operator. When
Rosamund stepped briefly out of the room,
Joelle heard a message come through the radio
transceiver from someone named “Mark,” pro¬
posing a meeting at “Blue John” at 4:30 the
next afternoon. On Rosamunds return, when

Joelle mentioned that a message had come
through, the woman acted shocked and
quickly turned off the radio. Subsequently,
Joelle determined that “Blue John” was the
Blue John Caves near Castleton in Derbyshire.

Intrigued by Rosamund’s reaction (though
Joelle did not tell her what the message had
said), Joelle made a point of driving through
the cave area on her way back to London.
Parking her car in an out-of-the-way place at
the appointed time, she watched from a dis¬
tance as a disc-shaped aircraft landed and a
man from inside the craft emerged to meet a
waiting man, apparently Jack, whose car she
recalled seeing parked in front of the house
the day before. As the two drove away, the air¬
craft shot off at high speed. Joelle thought she
had witnessed spy activity and assumed the
aircraft to be an advanced Soviet vehicle.

Joelle was almost ready to report her obser¬
vations and suspicions to the police but felt
compelled to call on the couple one more
time. She drove directly to their residence and
knocked on the door, explaining to Jack—
who had barely opened the door—that she
had some further survey questions to ask. She
was admitted into the house at the insistence
of the man she recognized from the ren¬
dezvous of a few minutes earlier. The stranger,
no longer dressed in uniform but in ordinary
street clothing, identified himself as “Mark.”
Speaking in a teasing, good-natured tone, he
said he knew why she was there.

Thus began Joelle’s interaction with space
people. Over the next fifteen months, she
spent eight and a half hours in the company
of Mark and another human-looking extrater¬
restrial she called “Val.” Mark and Val proved
vague about their exact place of origin, except
to say that it was an earthlike planet in an¬
other solar system. They also said they had
played a role in speeding up human evolution.
They were here to work secretly with scientists
from several countries, but as to their larger
purpose, they would only state, “We are not
here for entirely philanthropic purposes.”

On one occasion, Joelle was allowed to
touch a spacecraft and to watch its departure.

166 Martian bees

Once she translated a Russian manuscript in
the British Museum for Mark and Val, and at
other times she entertained them in her
home, finding them to be pleasant compan¬
ions with a good senses of humor and a love
of earthly food, wine, and music. She was
shown devices that projected holographic im¬
ages of their home planet, and once Val him¬
self showed up in holographic form.

The visitors told Joelle that they and their
associates had, indeed, contacted Adamski,
the best-known and most controversial of the
early contactees, but that he had proved un¬
trustworthy, revealing information he had
been given in confidence. After that they fed
him false information that they knew would
discredit him, and Adamski himself, frus¬
trated because the space people were drawing
away from him, began fabricating encounters.

See Also: Adamski, George; Contactees; Orthon

Further Reading

Adamski, George, 1955. Inside the Space Ships. New
York: Abelard-Schuman.

Good, Timothy, 1998. Alien Base: Earth’s Encounters
with Extraterrestrials. London: Century.

Martian bees

In one of the very first books on the then-new
phenomenon of UFOs, British writer Gerald
Heard offered a theory that even now, more
than half a century later, is a distinctive one.
Heard, who in 1950 was living in Los Ange¬
les, read an interview in the Los Angeles Times
with astronomer Gerard Kuiper. Though ve¬
hemently anti-UFO, Kuiper thought it at
least possible that intelligent life existed on
Mars. He added, however, that conditions
there being what there were (or at least as they
were thought to be at the time), Martians
would likely be advanced insects of some sort.
Possibly, Kuiper was speaking humorously,
but Heard, a mystically inclined individual,
took him seriously. He proposed that just
such beings were piloting the flying saucers.

These superbees were “perhaps two inches
in length ... as beautiful as the most beautiful
of any flower, any beetle, moth or butterfly. A

creature with eyes like brilliant cut-diamonds,
with a head of sapphire, a thorax of emerald,
an abdomen of ruby, wings like opal, legs like
topaz—such a body would be worthy of this
‘super-mind.’ ... It is we who would feel
shabby and ashamed, and may be with our
clammy, putty-colored bodies, repulsive!”

The Martians had come to Earth, Heard
speculated, because they feared the effect hu¬
mans’ aggressive ways and atomic bombs
could have on them. What if human beings
blew up the Earth and huge dust clouds cut
off the sun’s rays, turning Mars into an even
colder planet? It was also possible that Earth’s
“very powerful magnetic field” might generate
dangerous sunspots and send deadly radiation
into Mars’s atmosphere. Perhaps the superbees
were here in what amounted to a police ac¬
tion; to stop us from causing further trouble
to them and to the rest of the solar system. So
far, however, Heard said, the Martians were
acting with remarkable patience, in the fash¬
ion of “very circumspect, very intelligent gen¬
tlemen” (Heard, 1950).

See Also: Allingham’s Martian; Aurora Martian;
Brown’s Martians; Hopkins’s Martians; Khauga;
Mince-Pie Martians; Monka; Muller’s Martians;
Shaw’s Martians; Smead’s Martians; Wilcox’s
Martians

Further Reading

Heard, Gerald, 1950. The Riddle of the Flying
Saucers: Is Another World Watching.? London: Car-
roll and Nicholson.

Mary

Mary is one of a number of extraterrestrials
who are alleged to have made appearances at
the annual Giant Rock, California, Interplan¬
etary Spacecraft Convention held between
1954 and 1977. In 1959, while attending the
convention, Harry Mayer observed mysteri¬
ous globes of light hovering over the runway
at Giant Rock’s tiny airport. As he was run¬
ning toward them, a pretty, young, blond
woman suddenly appeared in front of him,
put out her arm, and stopped him in his
tracks. Though she was barely more than five
feet tall, and Mayer was well over six feet, she

Meier, Eduard “Billy” 167

had, he told ufologist William Hamilton, “the
strength of many men” (Hamilton, 1996).

They spoke long enough for him to learn
that her name was Mary Under her coat, she
was wearing a chocolate-brown uniform that
looked something like a ski suit. She was, she
said, from Venus. Mayer attended at least one
more Giant Rock convention hoping to see
her again, but this turned out to be his one
and only contact with her.

Further Reading

Hamilton, William F., Ill, 1996. Alien Magic: UFO
Crashes — Abductions—Underground Bases. New
Brunswick, NJ: Global Communications.

Meier, Eduard “Billy” (1937- )

Born on February 3, 1937, in Bulach,
Switzerland, Eduard Albert “Billy” Meier
would become an international contactee
celebrity. (His nickname stems from a youth¬
ful fascination with characters from the Amer¬

ican Old West such as Wild Bill Hickok and
Billy the Kid.) Meier claims to have received a
mental message from space people when he
was five years old, after he and his father
watched a saucer-shaped object flying near
their house. In 1944, on his seventh birthday,
Meier met Sfath, a wise elderly extraterrestrial,
who took him for a ride on his spacecraft. In
the course of the flight, Sfath placed a helmet
over young Billy’s head and filled his mind
with advanced knowledge. Periodic contacts
with Sfath continued until Meier was a young
adult. Meier wandered through Europe, Asia,
and the Middle East. Traveling in Turkey in
August 1965, he suffered an accident, which
cost him half his arm. Soon afterward, he met
seventeen-year-old Kaliope (“Popi”) Zafireou
and married her. Back in Switzerland, the
Meiers settled in a rural village. On the after¬
noon of January 28, 1975, Meier pho¬
tographed a spacecraft and had an hour-and-
a-half conversation with its pilot, a beautiful
spacewoman named Semjase (pronounced

Eduard “Billy” Meier, one of the most controversial contactees (Fortean Picture Library)

168 Meier, Eduard “Billy

sem-ya-see). Meier would produce many
more photographs, claim more contacts, re¬
count trips into space and through time, and
become the most controversial contactee since
George Adamski.

Meier’s aliens came from the Pleiades star
system and from a planet named Erra, one of
ten planets in orbit around a sun known as
Tayget. The aliens got there from another
planet in the constellation of Lyra, where
thousands of years ago a war forced much of
the population to flee to other worlds. At one
point 2.8 million years ago, as they were ex¬
ploring the new galactic neighborhood, the
new Pleiadians found Earth, then housing
primitive human beings. Some Pleiadians in¬
termarried with humans, but their educa¬
tional efforts only led to a war with earthlings,
who used the newly supplied extraterrestrial
technology against the Pleiadians. A second
wave of Pleiadians was destroyed in the same
way. Semjase was part of a third wave. She and
her associates hoped to move human beings in
a positive direction, and they selected Meier as
their earthly agent.

Unlike nearly all other contacters, Meier’s
space friends were hostile to religion, though
apparently not to the notion of God as such.
Once, when Meier was aboard a spaceship
(“beamship” as the Pleiadians called them) he
was able to photograph the “Eye of God” in
deep space. He also traveled to the Pleiades
and into another dimension and secured pic¬
tures of dinosaurs, cavemen, and a future
earthquake in San Francisco. A virtual indus¬
try of Meier-related publications, photo¬
graphs, videos, and other materials found an
audience around the world. Wendelle C.
Stevens, an American, energetically promoted
Meier, till then little known to Americans. He
published books supporting Meier and had
the non-English-speaking Meier’s work trans¬
lated. Stevens’s efforts encouraged an indepen¬
dent journalist, Gary Kinder, to write a sur¬
prisingly sympathetic book for a mainstream
publisher.

To conservative ufologists, Meier seemed
like a shameless hoaxer. He became a particu¬

lar obsession to a young California man, Kal
Korff, who spent years investigating Meier’s
claims. He published two intensely critical
books published between 1981 and 1995. In¬
dependent analyses suggested that the “beam-
ships” in the photographs were in fact small
models, some suspended on fishing wire, oth¬
ers apparently held in hand. Investigators
traced other images in Meier’s photos to
NASA footage and (in the case of Semjase) a
picture in a European fashion magazine. In
the mid-1990s, after Popi Meier divorced her
husband, she told European ufologists that
her former husband’s claims were bogus.

According to Meier, the Pleiadians—who
call themselves Plejarans—withdrew all of
their bases on Earth in February 1995 to
protest the proliferation of phony claims of
contact with them. Since then Meier has ex¬
perienced approximately four contacts a year
with Ptaah, who is Semjase’s father. He claims
more than 250 contacts with Pleiadians, in
general, since 1975.

See Also: Adamski, George; Contactees; Semjase

Further Reading

Elders, Lee J., Brit Nilsson-Elders, and Thomas K.
Welch, 1979. UFO. . . Contact from the Pleiades,
Volume I. Phoenix, AZ: Genesis III Productions.

-, 1983. UFO. . . Contact from the Pleiades,

Volume II. Phoenix, AZ: Genesis III Productions.

FIGU—Los Angeles Study Group, n.d. The Official
Billy Meier Web Page. http://www.billymeier.
com/index-alt. html.

Kinder, Gary, 1987. Light Years: An Investigation into
the Extraterrestrial Experiences of Eduard Meier.
New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.

Korff, Kal K., 1995. Spaceships of the Pleiades: The
Billy Meier Story. Amherst, NY: Prometheus
Books.

Korff, Kal K., with William L. Moore, 1981. The
Meier Incident—The Most Infamous Hoax in Ufol -
ogy. Fremont, CA: self-published.

Maccabee, Bruce, 1989. “Pendulum from the
Pleiades.” International UFO Reporter 14, 1 (Jan¬
uary/February): 11-12, 22.

Stevens, Wendelle C., 1983. UFO. . . Cotttact from
the Pleiades—A Preliminary Investigation Re -
port — The Report of an Ongoing Contact. Tucson,
AZ: self-published.

-, 1989. UFO . . . Contact from the Pleiades: A

Supplementary Investigation Report—The Report of
an Ongoing Contact. Tucson, AZ: self-published.

Me-leelah 169

Stevens, Wendelle C., ed., 1988. Message from the
Pleiades: The Contact Notes of Eduard “Billy”
Meier, Volume I. Phoenix, AZ: Wendelle C.
Stevens and Genesis III Publishing.

-, ed., 1990. Message from the Pleiades: The

Contact Notes of Eduard “Billy” Meier, Volume II.
Phoenix, AZ: Wendelle C. Stevens and Genesis
III Publishing.

-, ed., 1994. Message from the Pleiades: The

Contact Notes ofEdtiard “Billy” Meier, Volume III.
Phoenix, AZ: Wendelle C. Stevens and Genesis
III Publishing.

Winters, Randolph, 1994. The Pleiadian Mission: A
Time of Awareness. Atwood, CA: The Pleiades
Project.

Me-leelah

Me-leelah is a Pleiadian woman who figures
in an abduction incident said to have oc¬
curred in Johannesburg, South Africa, in the
early hours of July 19, 1988.

Phyllis and her adult, married daughter
Diane were in the latter’s car (Diane was
driving her mother home) when they noticed
an unusual starlike object. As it approached,
they could see inside what proved to be an
elongated craft. Through its lighted win¬
dows, they glimpsed its interior and saw six
figures inside. Suddenly, they felt a presence
inside their vehicle. They heard a clicking
sound and abruptly found themselves as¬
cending a ramp into the UFO. A finely
skinned, short woman with slightly slanted
eyes and no hair, yet beautiful nonetheless,
guided Diane. The alien woman wore a one-
piece, navy-blue suit such as a jogger might
wear. The three walked through an aromatic
“mist” before entering the main part of the
craft. Their guide told them, “Greetings. I
am from the Pleiades, and my name is Me-
leelah. I am the commander of the craft”
(Hind, 1996). She spoke in a soft but high-
pitched, sing-song voice.

There were eight persons—two women
and six men—inside the craft. One of the
men helped as Me-leelah put the two women
on tables and subjected each to a physical ex¬
amination, including an X ray and a shot
under the right breast (this, it was explained,

was done in order to collect DNA and RNA
samples). The other crewmembers paid no
heed to the abductees. Afterward, Me-leelah
showed them what looked like an ordinary
map of the world. She told them that giant
waves would soon destroy much of South
Africa’s Cape area. Comparable destruction
would occur elsewhere on the Earth with con¬
siderable loss of life. Those who wanted to
survive should flee to the mountainous areas
of Spain. The United States would go to war
in the Middle East, and AIDS would kill
many people everywhere.

At the conclusion of the examination, the
two women stepped down from the tables.
Me-leelah spoke and then performed some act
that later neither Phyllis nor Diane could re¬
call. All they knew was that Me-leelah was
abruptly wearing a different, more attractive-
looking jacket. Soon the two became aware
that Me-leelah was reading their minds. She
would verbally answer questions they had
formed only in their minds. At one point,
after Diane had answered a question of Me-
leelah’s less than truthfully, the Pleiadean
brought her face within inches of Diane’s. Her
pupils became vertical, disturbingly reptilian.
After the moment of anger had passed, Me-
leelah told them they could go. Two of the
men escorted them back to their car, but not
before the commander had promised that
they would meet again in two years’ time. She
added that this was two years in Pleiadean
time, four in Earth time.

By the time they got home, neither woman
remembered the incident. They only noted
how strangely quiet and calm everything
seemed to be: no traffic, no birds, no sound.
Over time, memories of the experience gradu¬
ally returned. May 1992 came and went with¬
out a further contact.

Cynthia Hind, a ufologist from Harare,
Zimbabwe, who investigated the story, says
the women were unread in the UFO litera¬
ture. They had not heard of other claims of
Pleiadean contacts, they claimed.

See Also: Abductions by UFOs; Meier, Eduard
“Billy”

170 Melora

Further Reading

Hind, Cynthia, 1996. UFOs over Africa. Madison,
WI: Horus House Press.

-, 2000. “Highlights from an African Case

Book.” Ohio UFO Notebook 21: 1—10.

Melora

Melora is a channeling entity who communi¬
cates through Jyoti Alla-An of Boulder, Col¬
orado. Alla-An characterizes Melora as a
“higher-dimensional group consciousness”
from the Sirius system. As is often the case
with such beings, “Melora”—Greek for
“golden apple”—is a name of convenience,
not the entity’s actual moniker; real names
for interdimensional beings are either nonex¬
istent or incomprehensible to humans.
Melora and her colleagues, Alla-An says, ask
us to call them names “with which we res¬
onate or which trigger us to remember our
soul histories.”

Melora is a higher member of Alla-An’s
“soul group.” At the time of their initial con¬
tact, Melora was serving on the Council of
Four with Pallas Athena, Ocala (an angel),
and Bi-la (a Tibetan guide). The Council of
Four existed to help people express their
“Being-ness.” Then Ocala and Bi-la merged
into Melora. In the future, it appears that
Melora and Athena will merge. Alla-An says,

During these years of my association with
Melora, it has been clear that SHE continues to
learn and grow through ME! Her flexibility, her
unconditional love, her compassion—all these
have taught me much about relationship with
the Divine. It has taught me how critical our
consciousness within incarnation is to the spir¬
itual development of non-physical versions of
ourselves in higher dimensions. Most impor¬
tantly, working with Melora has taught me
about how honored we are by all the higher be¬
ings in the light, who fully appreciate the diffi¬
culty of being light works in 3rd dimension.
(Alla-An, 1998)

See Also: Channeling
Further Reading

Alla-An, Jyoti, 1998. “Melora.” http://mhl02.infi.
net/ -lightexp/Melora3 .html.

Men in black

According to legend and report, strange indi¬
viduals, who are often menacing and usually
dressed in black suits, have threatened UFO
witnesses and investigators on a number of
occasions since the beginning of the UFO
age. The men in black (sometimes called
MIB) are variously suspected to be govern¬
ment agents, enforcers for powerful secret
groups (“International Bankers,” the New
World Order by another name), alien entities,
inner-earthers, or even demons.

In this last context, it is worth noting an
episode that occurred during a religious re¬
vival in Wales in 1905. When the revival was
at its most intense, many reported divine and
demonic supernatural encounters, and some
individuals, both believers and secular jour¬
nalists covering the revival, witnessed unusual
aerial phenomena that today might be
thought of as UFOs. A contemporary account
mentions that a “man dressed in black” visited
a young rural woman over three consecutive
nights to deliver “a message. . . which she is
frightened to relate” (Evans, 1905). In his
book on traditions of Satan, William Woods
writes that the devil “mostly... is dressed in
black, and always in the fashion of the day”
(Woods, 1974).

Men in black established a place in UFO
lore after a September 1953 incident. A
Bridgeport, Connecticut, man, Albert K.
Bender, headed one of the most successful
early UFO groups, the International Flying
Saucer Bureau, but closed it down suddenly.
After much prodding he confided to close as¬
sociates, most prominently Gray Barker, that
three individuals in dark suits had visited him
to warn that he had come too close to the
truth about UFOs. They passed on informa¬
tion that frightened him so badly that he
wanted nothing more to do with the subject.
Barker later wrote a sensationalistic, paranoia-
drenched book, They Knew Too Much about
Flying Saucers (1956), that, more than any
other single piece of writing, launched the
MIB legend. Though Bender initially hinted
that his visitors were from the government, he

Men in black 171

Albert K. Bender’s sketch of one of the three “men in black”
who visited his Connecticut house in September 1953 and
gave him the solution to the UFO mystery (Fortean Picture
Library)

eventually wrote Flying Saucers and the Three
Men (1962) for Barker’s small publishing
company. In what nearly all readers saw as an
amateurish science-fiction novel passing itself
off as factual, Bender identified the three men
as space people who abducted him to Antarc¬
tica, where Bender met monstrous beings at
an alien base.

The dismal reception afforded Bender’s
book would likely have ended MIB talk if not
for the emergence in the latter 1960s of John
A. Keel, who coined the term “MIB.” Keel, a
freelance writer living in New York City, se¬
cured a generous book contract from a major
New York publisher to write what was in¬
tended to be the definitive work on UFOs. An
occult theorist strongly attracted to de¬
monology, Keel held UFOs and their occu¬
pants to be shape-shifting entities from a sin¬
ister otherworld. Among their agents were
MIB who, in common with their brethren,

sought to confuse, manipulate, and even de¬
stroy those who encountered them or sought
to uncover the truth about them. Keel col¬
lected MIB reports from several states and fur¬
ther claimed that he had interacted with them
personally. In Keel’s view, MIB have played a
behind-the-scenes role in much of human his¬
tory and belief.

For the most part, Keel’s MIB could not
have passed easily for human. They were dark-
featured (or, conversely, unnaturally pale),
bug-eyed, and confused; and their behavior
betrayed their unfamiliarity with the earthly
environment and social customs. For some
reason, they usually drove black limousines,
frequently Cadillacs.

Other investigators collected similar reports
from around the world. Some suggested that
the MIB were government or military opera¬
tives, others that they were aliens. By 1966,
even the U.S. Air Force was hearing of such in¬
cidents and tried to run them down, without
success. Colonel George P. Freeman, a Penta¬
gon spokesman for the U.S. Air Force’s UFO-
investigating Project Blue Book, complained,
“We haven’t been able to find out anything
about these men” (Keel, 1975). In the 1990s,
ufologist William L. Moore would allege,
though without providing substantiating evi¬
dence, that “Men in Black are really govern¬
ment people in disguise . . . members of a
rather bizarre unit of Air Force intelligence
known currendy as the Air Force Special Ac¬
tivities Center (AFSAC)” (Moore, 1993).

In recent years, Jenny Randles, a well-
regarded English ufologist, has looked into
MIB cases in Britain. In her view, some are
genuinely puzzling, sometimes involving wit¬
nesses who have never heard of the phenome¬
non yet describe many of its classic features.
From interviews and official documents, Ran¬
dles was led to the conclusion that a secret de¬
partment of the Ministry of Defense was
monitoring certain kinds of UFO reports.

Further Reading

Barker, Gray, 1956. They Knew Too Much about Fly -
ing Saucers. New York: University Books.

172 Menger, Howard

Bender, Albert K., 1962. Flying Saucers and the Three
Men. Clarksburg, WV: Saucerian Books.

Evans, Beriah G., 1905. “Merionethshire Mysteries.”
Occult Review 1, 3 (March): 113-120.

Keel, John A., 1975. The Mothman Prophecies. New
York: Saturday Review Press/E. P. Dutton and
Company.

Moore, William L., 1993. “Those Mysterious Men
in Black.” Far Out (Winter): 27-29.

Randles, Jenny, 1997. The Truth behind Men in
Black: Government Agents—or Visitors from Be -
yond. New York: St. Martin’s Paperbacks.

Woods, William, 1974. A History of the Devil. New
York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

Menger, Howard (1922- )

Howard Menger (pronounced men- jer), a
New Jersey sign painter who was sometimes
called the East Coast equivalent of George
Adamski, rose to prominence in flying-saucer
contactee circles in the 1950s. In his first pub¬
lic appearance, on Long John Nebel’s radio
show on New York’s WOR, on October 29,
1956, Menger claimed lifelong contacts as
well as “flashback” memories of an earlier life
as an extraterrestrial. The space people were
mostly from Venus, and prominent among
them were beautiful, blond women. In early
1956, when the contacts intensified, Menger
began taking photographs of alleged space¬
craft. He also claimed interplanetary flights in
the company of “Aryan-type” beings and pro¬
duced, among others, pictures of the lunar
surface taken from a flying saucer.

Conservative ufologists scoffed at Menger’s
tales and rejected his photographs as absurdly
unconvincing. Writing in Saucer News, Lonzo
Dove deemed them “so evidently faked that it
is almost foolish to even criticize them”
(Dove, 1959). When the anticontactee Na¬
tional Investigations Committee on Aerial
Phenomena challenged Menger and other
contactees to submit to polygraph examina¬
tions, Menger declined.

His supporters flocked to his High Bridge,
New Jersey, farm, where some reported seeing,
from a distance, “spacemen” in luminous uni¬
forms and other oddities, attributed by skep¬
tics to effects engineered by Menger confeder-

Howard Menger with a “free energy ” machine (Fortean
Picture Library)

ates. One supporter apparently was Connie
Weber, an attractive young blond woman to
whom Menger, a married man, had turned his
romantic attentions. Menger declared Weber
to be the sister of a spacewoman he had met
in 1946. For her part, Weber “recalled” that in
previous lives she had been a Venusian and
Menger had been a Saturnian (a relationship
she documented in a lurid 1958 book, My
Saturnian Lover). On one occasion, four fol¬
lowers of Menger’s were invited separately
into a dark room, where each had a brief audi¬
ence with a spacewoman concealed in shadow.
When a sliver of light accidentally caught the
supposed spacewoman, however, one of them
recognized Weber. Subsequently, Menger left
his wife and married Weber.

By the time his book From Outer Space to
You appeared in 1959, Menger had largely
withdrawn from the saucer scene. The next
year, interviewed on Long John Nebel’s televi¬
sion show, Menger startled his host and audi¬
ence by seeming to disavow his former claims.
In the 1960s, he changed his story, now as-

Metatron 173

serting that he had participated in an elabo¬
rate hoax at the instigation of a secret govern¬
ment agency that wanted to test human reac¬
tions to extraterrestrial visitors.

Howard and Connie Menger moved to
Vero Beach, Florida, where they lived qui¬
etly for more than two decades. In 1990,
they resurfaced at the National UFO Con¬
ference in Miami Beach and began publish¬
ing materials that again presented the space
contacts as authentic. They also appeared in
the 1992 Discovery Channel documentary
Farewell, Good Brothers. They make occa¬
sional appearances on the saucer and New
Age scene.

See Also: Adamski, George; Contactees

Further Reading

Baxter, Marla [pseud, of Constance Weber Menger],
1958. My Saturnian Lover. New York: Vantage
Press.

“Contactee Letters,” 1957. Confidential Bulletin to
NICAPMembers (September 6).

Dove, Lonzo, 1957. “Mengers Adamski-Type
Saucers.” Saucer News 4, 2 (February-March):
6-7.

Menger, Howard, 1959. From Outer Space to You.
Clarksburg, WV: Saucerian Books.

Moseley, James W., 1966. “Strange New Ideas from
Howard Menger.” Saucer News Non-Scheduled
Newsletter 26 (January 25).

Nebel, Long John, 1961. The Way Out World. Engle¬
wood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Schwarz, Berthold E., 1972. “Beauty of the Night.”
Flying Saucer Review 18, 4 (August): 5-9, 17.

Merk

According to George Hunt Williamson,
eighteen thousand years ago a Venusian
named Merk flew a “Light Ship” to Telos, an
eastern section of Lemuria in what is now Ari¬
zona, initiating a period of cordial and pro¬
ductive relationships between Venusians and
Lemurians, who then had developed flight
but not space flight. The Lemurians built a
memorial to commemorate the spot where
Merk’s craft had landed.

See Also: Lemuria; Williamson, George Hunt

Further Reading

Williamson, George Hunt, 1959. Road in the Sky.

London: Neville Spearman.

Mersch

According to Colorado contactee Dave Schultz,
six extraterrestrial races are visiting Earth. One
is the Mersch. The Mersch are six feet tall,
weigh two hundred pounds, and have bald
heads and slanted eyes. Their home planet is in
the constellation Scorpio. They are active in ab¬
ductions and mutilation of cattle and other ani¬
mals in western states.

See Also: Abductions by UFOs; Contactees; Olliana
Olliana Alliano

Further Reading

Sprinkle, R. Leo, ed., 1982. Proceedings: Rocky
Mountain Conference on UFO Investigation.
Laramie, WY: School of Extended Studies, Uni¬
versity of Wyoming.

Metatron

Metatron is a “divine interface between God
and the outer worlds—meaning us on the
outer layers of physical creation—the hard¬
ened shell around the cosmic egg of Light”
(Arvey, 1994). Metatronic energy is transmit¬
ted once a week to the Earth, and seekers can
gain access to it if they are attuned to the
proper frequency. Much of the information
Metatron sends is of a densely technical na¬
ture. A good part of the channeled material
comes through James J. Hurtak, who records
it in The Book of Knowledge: The Keys of Enoch
(1982). Hurtak, however, is far from the only
Metatron channeler.

The most famous communicant with
Metatron is the rock guitarist Carlos Santana.
Santana claims that Metatron was responsible
for the restoration of his career in 1999 and
2000. During a meditation session Metatron
told him, “We want to hook you back to the
radio-airwave frequency” and to “reconnect
the molecules to the light,” presumably mean¬
ing renewed airplay and popular attention
(Gates and Gordon, 2000).

The name Metatron comes out of tradi¬
tional Jewish mysticism, where Metatron is
depicted as an archangel, perhaps the highest
of them all. Some mystics believe that on
Earth he was the prophet Enoch whom God
took directly to heaven without the transi-

174 Michael

Carlos Santana, the most famous communicant with
Metatron, performing in Munich, Germany, May 2000
(AFP/Corbis)

tional detail of dying. Other sources assert
that it was he who led the Israelites through
the wilderness after the Exodus.

Further Reading

Arvey, Michael, 1994. “Metatron.” http://www.spir-
itweb.org/Spirit/metatron-arvey.html.

Davidson, Gustav, 1967. A Dictionary of Angels. New
York: Free Press.

Gates, David, and Devin Gordon, 2000. “Smooth as
Santana.” Newsweek (February 14): 66-67.

Gilmore, Robert and Laurie, eds., n.d. “The Ascen¬
sion Is Life Lived from Joy.” http://www.nite-
hawk.com/daydove/25metatr.html.

Hurtak, James J., 1982. The Book of Knowledge: The
Keys of Enoch. Los Gatos, CA: Academy for Fu¬
ture Science.

Stone, Joshua David, 1994. The Complete Ascension
Manual. Sedona, AZ: Light Technology Publish¬
ing.

Michael

In two books, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro chroni¬
cled the channeling experiences of a young
San Francisco-area woman given the name

Jessica Lansing. Yarbro wrote that in 1970, as
Jessica and her husband, Walter (also a pseu¬
donym), played with a ouija board after din¬
ner, they began receiving communications
from an entity who first refused to answer the
question, “Who is this?” Eventually, under
prodding, it said, “The last name a fragment
of this entity used was Michael.” “Michael”
went on to say, “We are of the mid-causal
lane. The astral plane is accessible to the phys¬
ical plane. We are not” (Yarbro, 1979).
Michael claimed to be composed of more
than a thousand fragments of “old souls.”

In later automatic writing and channeling,
Michael—who resisted being identified by a
masculine pronoun—taught that each indi¬
vidual must go through seven basic soul
stages over a minimum of seven reincarnated
lives. But Michael would respond impatiently
if someone asked a question about his or her
personal life. “We are not the Ann Landers of
the cosmos,” Michael snapped. As the
Michael phenomenon grew, however, this
changed, and Michael would speak to indi¬
viduals about themselves and offer them
guidance.

Jessica Lansing herself was uncertain
whether Michael was an independent intelli¬
gence or some manifestation of an aspect of
her psyche. In time, others reported commu¬
nications from Michael. In 1984, two follow¬
ers founded the Michael Educational Founda¬
tion. The foundation maintains that Michael
is a collection of one thousand fifty souls, all
of whom once lived lives on Earth. It sponsors
other Michael groups throughout the United
States. Michael F. Brown, an anthropologist
who has studied the channeling movement,
calls Michael “as close to a channeling fran¬
chise as one can find in the United States
today” (Brown, 1997).

“According to Michael,” the foundation
states, “we agree to come into each lifetime
with a basic Role that we play to best support
the world around us. In addition to this Role,
we have numerous ‘Overleaves’ or personality
traits that we choose to play from” (“Who Is
Michael?” n.d.).

Mince-Pie Martians 175

See Also: Channeling
Further Reading

Brown, Michael F., 1997. The Channeling Zone:
American Spirituality in an Anxious Age. Cam¬
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Melton, J. Gordon, 1996. Encyclopedia of American
Religions. Fifth edition. Detroit, MI: Gale Re¬
search.

“Who Is Michael?” n.d. http://amt.to/mef/mchan.
html.

Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn, 1979. Messages from Michael.
New York: Playboy Paperbacks.

-, 1986. More Messages from Michael. New

York: Berkley Paperbacks.

Michigan giant

According to the Saginaw Courier-Herald of
April 17, 1897, a “flying machine” landed half
a mile southwest of Reynolds, Michigan, at
4:30 A.M. on the fourteenth. Witnesses who
had seen it hovering rushed to the scene,
where, to their shock, they spotted its pilot,
who appeared human but was nine and a half
feet tall. His “talk, while musical, is not talk at
all, but seems to be a repetition of bellowing.”
The being looked hot and uncomfortable
even though he was nearly naked. What
looked like polar-bear pelts lay nearby, appar¬
ently winter clothing for which the traveler
had no use at the moment.

One farmer made the mistake of approach¬
ing the figure too closely. For his efforts he
found himself at the receiving end of a severe
kick. It was delivered with sufficient ferocity
and velocity that the man’s hip broke.

The article, clearly written with tongue in
cheek, concludes, “Great excitement prevails
here, and lots of people are flocking here from
Morley and Howard City to view the strange
being from a distance, as no one dares to go near.
He seems to be trying to talk to the people.”

See Also: Aurora Martian; Close encounters of the
third kind; Oleson’s giants; Smith; Wilson

Further Reading

Migrants

In George Hunt Williamson’s alternative his¬
tory Other Tongues—Other Flesh (1953), “Mi¬
grants” are spirit beings from the Sirius Star sys¬
tem. They arrived on Earth during the Miocene
Epoch (between twenty-five and thirteen mil¬
lion years ago) with the intention of looking for
bodies to inhabit. At first, they gave serious con¬
sideration to cats, but after due reflection they
decided that apes were more likely to evolve to¬
ward intelligence, civilization, and technology.
In the meantime, employing their vast paranor¬
mal powers, the Migrants conjured up
grotesque material forms for themselves. This
period is known among extraterrestrial histori¬
ans of Earth as the “Great Abomination.”

Williamson reported, “The abomination
was so vast that forms were fusing together
into monsters having no purpose but self-de¬
struction. Men and animals were growing in¬
terchangeable of spirit and structure. Man was
beastly and beast was manlike.” These abom¬
inable entities took the forms of the creatures
remembered in legend and mythology as
griffins, centaurs, dragons, and sphinxes.
Eventually the “Host on the Sirian planets”
could take no more of this insubordination.
Men were to be men, beasts were to be beasts,
the Host declared before setting loose a kind
of global warming that melted the poles and
sparked huge floods. “Monsters and anom¬
alies were destroyed,” the channeled entity
Elder Brother informed Williamson. “No
longer could they propagate. Pure species
were saved and pronounced sterile unto all
but themselves.” The Migrants lost all their
psychokinetic powers and became normal pri¬
mates. They began engaging in sexual unions
with ape-women, and out of these alliances
modern Homo sapiens eventually emerged.

See Also: Williamson, George Hunt

Further Reading

Williamson, George Hunt, 1953. Other Tongues —
Other Flesh. Amherst, WI: Amherst Press.

Mince-Pie Martians

The so-called Mince-Pie Martians appeared in
a kitchen in Rowley Regis, in England’s West

176 Mince-Pie Martians

Midlands, on January 4, 1979, to star in what
may well be Britain’s most bizarre close en¬
counter of the third kind.

At 6 A.M., Jean Hingley, forty-five years
old, had just sent her husband off to work
when she noticed a light outside. Thinking
the carport light was still on, she went out to
check. She was unsettled to see a large orange
sphere hovering over the carport roof. She
hurried back inside and, with her dog Hobo,
watched the UFO. As she was doing so, she
noticed that the dog seemed to be frozen as if
paralyzed. Suddenly he fell over sideways and
lay there motionless.

At that moment, three winged figures
zipped past her, leaving Mrs. Hingley feeling
cold and weak. She managed to follow them
into the living room, where two of them were
shaking the Christmas tree so hard that the
fairy atop it fell to the floor. The figures them¬
selves looked almost fairylike. Three and a
half feet tall, they were humanoids with wide,
white faces, big, dark eyes, no noses, slitlike
mouths, and large oval wings covered with
glittering dots of various colors. Each wore a
transparent helmet on its head; at the top of
the helmet a light shone. There were no fin¬
gers on the hands or feet on the legs; each just
tapered to a point. The wings did not move
like a bird’s but fluttered gently or folded in
like a concertina.

Hingley found herself paralyzed, unable to
speak or move, until the beings spoke to her,
saying, “Nice?” They spoke in unison with
what sounded like a gruff, masculine voice.
Then she could move and talk again. When
she asked where they were from, they were
silent. They sailed around the room, then
landed and bounced up and down on the
couch. She shouted at them to stop, and they
did, though this would be the last time they
did what she asked them to do.

The episode lasted for an hour. It was often
difficult, trying, and even painful. If they did
not like what she had to say, a beam would
shoot from the light at the top of their hel¬
mets and hit her on the forehead just above
the bridge of the nose. Sometimes she would

be blinded. At other times she would be para¬
lyzed. And at yet other times, when she had
addressed them with a seemingly inoffensive
question, the light would not hurt her. They
would not tell her why they shot the light at
her, or why they would quote back to her any
question she asked them. The experience
made her eyes sore, and when she com¬
plained, the beings insisted they did not in¬
tend to harm her.

When she inquired again about their place
of origin, they replied this time, “From the
sky.” Seeing a picture of Jesus on the wall,
they flew up to it and engaged her in a con¬
versation about him, then went on to banal
subjects (a British entertainment figure, the
Queen, the role of the housewife, children)
before returning to Jesus. Then they floated
slowly around the room picking up small ob¬
jects, including cassette tapes. Hingley told
investigators, “They touched all the Christ¬
mas cards and all the furniture. ... I think
they had magnets in their hands, ’cause they
kept lifting things that they touched.” They
asked for water. In response she filled four
glasses and put them on a tray, along with sev¬
eral mince pies. She lifted a glass, and the be¬
ings lifted theirs, but when they saw her
watching them, they blinded her with the
light beam. The next thing she knew, they
were putting empty glasses down. Next she
thought of offering them cigarettes and cigars
that they were looking at. When she lit one,
however, the beings recoiled in fright. She
thought they were afraid of fire.

A loud noise brought her to the window,
where she saw that the orange UFO was back.
The beings “put their hands to their sides,”
she recalled. “They lifted themselves up,”
pressing buttons on their chests, and “they
glided themselves out.” Each was holding its
mince pie. They sailed out the back door and
entered through an opening in the UFO,
which flew away and was soon lost to view.

At that moment, Hingley suffered “agony,
pure agony. . . . My legs, I couldn’t feel them,
and then I was wobbly, and very, very weak. I
grabbed the table. I slid my feet along the

Monka 177

carpet, and I got on the settee, and I didn’t
know how long I was there. Ooh! I was
dead!” (Budden, 1988). She lay incapacitated
until five o’clock that afternoon. Finally, her
strength was sufficiently restored so that she
was able to phone her husband, a neighbor,
and the police.

Investigators found an oval-shaped im¬
pression in the backyard snow. Hingley com¬
plained that her clock, radio, and television
were no longer functioning. The cassette
tapes that she said the beings had touched
were ruined. She suffered a range of physical
discomforts in her eyes, ears, and jaw. Her
doctor became alarmed enough about her
well-being that he ordered her to stay home
from work for two weeks. As outlandish as
her story sounded, investigators did not
doubt her sincerity.

See Also: Close encounters of the third kind

Further Reading

Budden, Alfred, 1988. “The Mince-Pie Martians:
The Rowley Regis Case.” Fortean Times 50 (Sum¬
mer): 40-44.

Miniature pilots

One day in 1929, according to a story she
told many years later, a five-year-old girl and
her eight-year-old brother were playing in the
garden of their Hertford, Hertfordshire, En¬
gland, home when they heard an engine
sound. It was coming from a nearby orchard
and over the garden fence. As its source came
into view, the children saw a tiny biplane,
with a wingspan of no more than twelve to fif¬
teen inches, descend and land briefly by a
garbage pail. During the few seconds that it
was on the ground, both children got a clear
view of a figure they described as a “perfectly
proportioned tiny pilot wearing a leather fly¬
ing helmet,” who they said, “waved to us as he
took off.”

The sight so unsettled the two that it wasn’t
until they were well into their adult lives,
around I960, that they spoke of it to each
other. “I have no explanation to offer,” the
woman said, “but I do know that this was not

a figment of my imagination” (Creighton,
1970).

In a UFO-age counterpart to this strange
story, a Seattle woman reported that around 2
A.M. one night in late August 1965 she awoke
paralyzed. Unable to speak or move, she
watched helplessly as a football-shaped gray
object sailed through her open window and
hovered over a carpet in her bedroom. As the
tiny UFO prepared to land, three tripod legs
dropped from it. Once settled on the floor,
the UFO let out a ramp, down which stepped
five or six miniature beings clad in tight-fit¬
ting uniforms. They then engaged in what ap¬
peared to be repair work on their craft. On
completing the job, they walked up the ramp
and into the ship and flew away. At that
point, the witness found that she had regained
normal mobility.

It seems likely that this second incident was
a hallucination of a kind frequently associated
with sleep paralysis.

Further Reading

Creighton, Gordon, 1970. “A Weird Case from the
Past.” Flying Saucer Review 16, 4 (July/August):
30.

Hufford, David J., 1982. The Terror That Comes in
the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Super -
natural Assault Traditions. Philadelphia, PA: Uni¬
versity of Pennsylvania Press.

Keel, John A., 1970. UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse.
New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

Monka

Monka first surfaced as the disembodied voice
of a Martian on a tape owned by contactee
Dick Miller. Miller played the message at the
April 1956 Giant Rock Interplanetary Space¬
craft Convention, telling the audience that
the voice had mysteriously appeared on a tape
inside a sealed can. The message had Monka
(“I am what you would call the head of my
government”) promising, “On the evening of
November 7, of this your year 1956, at 10:30
P.M. your local time, we request that one of
your communications stations remove its car¬
rier signal from the air for two minutes”
(“Mon-Ka of Mars,” 1956). From ten thou-

178 Mothman

sand feet the occupants of a brilliantly illumi¬
nated spacecraft would speak to the people of
Los Angeles.

The message electrified occultists and
saucerians in California and elsewhere. When
played in London in September, it had the
same effect on their British counterparts.
Newspaper coverage mocked the tape and
message, and conservative ufologists dismissed
the message as a silly hoax. On November 2,
the Los Angeles Mirror-News reported that
some months before, while living in Detroit,
Miller had been caught faking a radio message
from a spaceman. All this notwithstanding,
the Monka message spurred two mass rallies
in Los Angeles, and Monka enthusiast and
rally organizer Gabriel Green appeared on the
widely viewed House Party television show to
spread the word that friendly extraterrestrials
would be talking to southern California on
November 7.

As a publicity stunt, two area radio stations
went off the air for two minutes on the night
in question as hundreds of believers gathered
on rooftops. No UFO appeared, of course,
but Monka would live on in channeled mes¬
sages from hundreds of contactees up to the
present. No longer a Martian, he is now usu¬
ally taken as a close associate of the most
beloved and ubiquitous of interdimensional
channeling entities, Ashtar.

Further Reading

Beckley, Timothy Green, 1981. Book of Space Con -
tacts. New York: Global Communications.

Garrison, Omar, 1956. “Time Flew by, but That Fly¬
ing Saucer Didn’t.” Los Angeles Mirror-News (No¬
vember 8).

“Mon-Ka of Mars Gives Saucer Research a Black
Eye,” 1956. CSI News Letter 6 (December 15):
3-5.

Tuella [pseud, of Thelma B. Turrell], ed., 1989.
Ashtar: A Tribute. Third edition. Salt Lake City,
UT: Guardian Action Publications.

Mothman

Mothman, a monstrous creature reported by
dozens of witnesses in towns along the Ohio
River Valley, got its name from a villain in the

then-popular Batman television series. Though
their stories received little public attention, at
least one witness claimed to have had a kind of
communication with it.

Mothman first appeared in the local press
in November 1966, after two young couples
spotted it around 11:30 P.M. while driving
through an abandoned World War II muni¬
tions complex known locally as the “TNT
area.” Gray in color with humanlike legs, the
creature had glowing red, “hypnotic” eyes
and, witness Roger Scarberry said, “was
shaped like a man, but bigger. Maybe six and
a half feet tall. And it had big wings against its
back” (Keel, 1975). Terrified, the witnesses
fled in their car only to spot the same or a
similar creature on a hill by the road. That
creature spread its batlike wings and pursued
the vehicle at speeds of up to one hundred
miles per hour. All the while, it made a
squeaking sound. As they sped toward Point
Pleasant, West Virginia, where they would tell
their story to a deputy sheriff, they noticed a
large, dead dog along the side of the road.

This last detail would seem significant to
later investigators after they learned of the
experience that had happened an hour before
to Newell Partridge from rural Salem, West
Virginia. Partridge had been watching televi¬
sion when suddenly he saw an unfamiliar
kind of interference on the screen. In the
meantime, he could hear his dog Bandit
howling strangely. When he picked up a
flashlight and stepped outside, he was
shocked to see—at one hundred fifty yards’
distance—the dog circling a shadowy figure
with glowing red eyes that did not look like
an animal’s. Something about the scene
struck Partridge as deeply abnormal, and he
felt cold chills running down his back. Just
as he was about to go inside, Bandit charged
the intruder, ignoring his master, who was
trying to restrain him. Partridge went inside
to get a gun but could not bring himself to
go outside again. He went to sleep. The next
morning he discovered that Bandit was miss¬
ing. Later, when he read a newspaper ac¬
count of the Point Pleasant incident, the ref-

Mount Lassen 179

erence to a dead dog struck him. Bandit was
never seen again.

Other witnesses reported seeing “Moth-
man,” as the press soon dubbed it, in the
TNT area and elsewhere. Sightings continued
from time to time for months afterward. Re¬
ports consistently described a gray entity
larger than a man, who was headless and had
wings, legs, and glowing red eyes on its upper
chest. When in flight, its wings did not flap.
When it walked, it had a shambling gait. Ob¬
servers seemed especially terrified of the eyes.
Because of the witnesses’ manifest sincerity
and terror, no one argued that the sightings
were hoaxes. The most popular conventional
explanations held that they had seen owls or
sandhill cranes. The episode became the sub¬
ject of two books.

In May 1976, nearly a decade after the
scare had run its course, representatives of the
Ohio UFO Investigators League looked up
some of the witnesses. All stuck by their orig¬
inal testimony and insisted that they had not
mistaken ordinary birds for Mothman. The
most curious testimony came from early wit¬
ness Linda Scarberry (wife of Roger Scar-
berry), who said that she and her husband
had seen the creature “hundreds of times,”
one from as close as three or four feet. She
went on,

It seems like it doesn’t want to hurt you. It just
wants to communicate with you. But you’re
too afraid when you see it to do anything. . . .
We rented an apartment down on Thirteenth
Street, and the bedroom window was right off
the roof. It was sitting on the roof one night,
looking in the window, and by then I was so
used to seeing it that I just pulled the blinds
and went on. I felt kind of sorry for it [be¬
cause] it gives you the feeling like it was sitting
there wishing it could come in and get warm
because it was cold out that night. (Raynes,
1976)

A Mothmanlike creature was also involved
in a close encounter of the third kind from
Sandling Park, near Hyde, Kent, England, on
November 16, 1963. That evening a group of

young people saw a glowing oval, some fifteen
to twenty feet in diameter, hovering over a
field. A few seconds after the UFO disap¬
peared behind a clump of trees, witness John
Flaxton related, “a dark figure shambled out. It
was all black, about the size of a human but
without a head. It seemed to have wings like a
bat on either side and came stumbling towards
us. We didn’t wait to investigate” (“The Salt-
wood Mystery,” 1964). This is the only known
report to link such a creature with a UFO.

Whatever Mothman may or may not have
been, no encounters with it have been re¬
ported in recent years.

See Also: Close encounters of the third kind

Further Reading

Barker, Gray, 1970. The Silver Bridge. Clarksburg,
WV: Saucerian Books.

Keel, John A., 1970. Strange Creatures from Time and
Space. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Gold Medal.

-, 1975. The Mothman Prophecies. New York:

Saturday Review Press/E. P. Dutton and Com¬
pany.

Raynes, Brent M., 1976. “West Virginia Revisited.”
Ohio Sky Watcher (January/February/March):
9-10.

“The Saltwood Mystery,” 1964. Flying Saucer Revietv
10, 2 (March/April): 11-12.

Mount Lassen

Mount Lassen, in California’s Tehama County,
houses good and evil beings who live deep in¬
side caves and engage in conflict with ad¬
vanced weapons, according to the testimony of
a man identified as Ralph B. Fields.

At some unspecified time, apparently, in
the latter twentieth century, Fields and a com¬
panion named Joe (no last name offered) went
to the mountain in search of guano (bat
dung), which they hoped to market as fertil¬
izer. On their first night, the two slept at the
foot of the mountain. By the third day, they
were nearing the mountaintop when they de¬
cided to make camp and prepare a meal. Joe
went off to collect dead scrub bush for the
fire. Suddenly, he returned in a state of high
excitement. He had found a big cave nearby,
and it looked like a promising place to search
for the object of their quest.

A Morlock (with victim) as depicted in the I960 movie version ofH. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (Photofest)

The deeper the two went into the cave, the yards ahead to a point where the wall bent,

deeper it seemed. Once they got twenty feet They followed the bend off to the left and

into it, the walls expanded to ten feet wide down, and they kept going until suddenly, re-

and eight feet high. They could see a hundred alizing how far they were from the surface,

Mount Shasta 181

they began to get nervous. Besides that, there
was no evidence of guano. Still curious, they
decided to plow ahead and kept walking for
another mile or two. Then, with the aid of
their flashlights, they made an amazing dis¬
covery: the floor was worn smooth, and the
cavern walls and ceiling seemed cut artificially.
What had seemed a cave now looked more
like a tunnel.

A light flashed, and three men confronted
Fields and Joe. The men were of normal ap¬
pearance, seemingly around fifty years of age,
dressed in jeans and flannel shirts. Only their
shoes, with their unusually thick soles, looked
out of the ordinary. One of the strangers
asked what they were doing there, but he
acted as if he did not believe the two men’s an¬
swer. Two more strangers showed up. The
guano-hunters were badly frightened, con¬
vinced that they had fallen into the hands of a
criminal gang in hiding. Their fears only rose
when one of the band told them that they
should accompany them deeper into the cave.

About two miles later, they came to a spot
where the walls expanded. There they encoun¬
tered a strange device that looked like a tobog¬
gan with a seat and a control panel. It gave off
a buzzing sound. The group sat on the wide
seat and flew off at a “terrific” speed. After a
journey of some considerable distance, they
saw a similar machine approaching them.
Suddenly acting nervous, they maneuvered
their machine to a stop. It landed two feet
from the other one. The crew of the first ship
leaped out and tried to run away, but the crew
of the second, who were carrying pencil-like
weapons, shot them down, killing all of them.

Certain of their imminent doom, Fields
and Joe watched as the new group approached
them. One member asked if they were “sur¬
face people.” After telling him that they had
come from there just recently, the stranger
went on to say that they were lucky they had
been rescued. “You would have also become
horloks, and then we would have had to kill
you also.” The man spoke in a friendly man¬
ner, giving Fields the confidence to ask what
was going on. All the man would say was that

surface people “are not ready to have the
things that the ancients have left.. . . How¬
ever, there are a great many evil people here
who create many unpleasant things for both
us and the surface people. They are safe be¬
cause no one on the surface believes that we
exist.”

Ralph and Joe were flown back to the sur¬
face and warned never to return. Fields says,
“We had been told just enough for me to be¬
lieve that down there somewhere there were
and are things that might baffle the greatest
minds of this Earth. Sometimes I am tempted
to go back into that cave if I could again find
it, which I doubt, but then I know the warn¬
ing I heard in there might be too true” (Com¬
mander X, 1990).

It may be worth noting that H. G. Wells’s
famous science-fiction novel The Time Ma -
chine (1895) features a race of violent subter¬
ranean humans known as Morlocks.

See Also: Brodies deros; Hollow earth; Mount
Shasta; Shaver mystery

Further Reading

Commander X [pseud, of Jim Keith], 1990. Under -
ground Alien Bases. New Brunswick, NJ: Abelard
Publications.

Mount Shasta

Mount Shasta in northern California, near the
Oregon border, is the scene of occult legends
that go back to the nineteenth century. Even
before white settlers arrived in the region in
1827, however, local Indian tribes believed
that giant creatures, apparently of the
Sasquatch variety, lived in caves on the moun¬
tain. The giants were feared because of their
habit of capturing individuals and taking
them to their caves, where they would squeeze
their victims to death. Another race of beings,
small, usually invisible entities akin to fairies,
also called Shasta their home, according to
tribal traditions.

But it took Frederick Spencer Oliver of
nearby Yreka, California, to put the mountain
on the mystical map. In the mid 1880s,
Oliver, then in his teens, produced a novel, A
Dweller on Two Planets, which he claimed an

A nineteenth-century engraving of Mount Shasta, California, the scene of occult legends from far back in the past (Library
of Congress)

entity named Phylos the Tibetan had dictated
to him. In fact, when the novel was published
in 1899, Phylos, not Oliver, was identified as
the author. Phylos said he had experienced
several incarnations, including one in Atlantis
and another on Venus. In his most recent one,
during the mid-century California gold rush,
he (“he” being Walter Pierson, the name he
held during that lifetime) met Quong, a Chi¬
nese man. Quong, a knower of mystical se¬
crets, led Pierson into Shasta via a hidden tun¬
nel. Inside the mountain they found huge
chambers and treasures belonging to a secret
brotherhood of advanced beings who had
lived there for a very long time, devoting
themselves to humanity’s spiritual betterment.
In his astral body, Pierson traveled to Venus,
where he learned many secrets; he also learned
of his previous lives. Once enlightened, he
was rechristened Phylos and became a
guardian of the cosmos. A modem chronicler
remarks that the “Tibetan” part of his title
“seems to have been added for Mystery’s sake”
(Kafton-Minkel, 1989).

Oliver’s novel owed much of its inspiration
to Madame Blavatsky’s theological writings
and to works of mystical fantasy such as Ed¬
ward Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni: A Rosicrucian
Tale and Marie Corelli’s A Romance of Two
Worlds. It was original, however, in setting a
secret civilization within Mount Shasta. The
next writer to do so, Harvey Spencer Lewis
(writing as “Wishar C. Cerve”), identified the
inhabitants as survivors of Lemuria, the Pa¬
cific Ocean’s version of Atlantis. According to
Lewis’s Lemuria: Lost Continent of the Pacific
(1931), when Lemuria split and sank, its east
coast crashed into part of North America’s
west coast to become the states of Washing¬
ton, Oregon, and California. Many of the sur¬
viving Lemurians took up residence inside
Shasta.

Lewis claimed that persons living near
Shasta occasionally encountered distin¬
guished-looking men in white robes as they
walked out of the forest. Sometimes these be¬
ings, who stood seven feet tall, did business in
local stores, using gold nuggets to make their

Mount Shasta 183

purchases and refusing change. The strangers
had long, curly hair, and on their large fore¬
heads there were bulges visible with “special
decoration” over them covering their third
eyes. Along the thick forests on Shasta’s east¬
ern flank, the Lemurians had built great mar¬
ble temples. On some evenings they held mys¬
tical celebrations at which they lit big fires and
danced. They also raised odd-looking cattle.
They flew “peculiarly shaped boats which
have flown out of this region high in the air
over the hills and valleys ... to the waters of
the Pacific Ocean.” Mostly, however, the
Lemurians managed to keep themselves and
their activities invisible, setting up energy
walls that effectively concealed them from
prying eyes.

The American branch of the Rosicrucians,
headquartered in San Jose, published Lewis’s
book. During the 1930s, it also sponsored ex¬
peditions that sought to locate the secret en¬
trances to Shasta. Articles in Rosicrucian Di -
gest discussed the mountain’s “mysteries.”
Then on May 22, 1932, the Los Angeles Times’
Sunday magazine ran a destined-to-be-influ-
ential piece by Edward Lanser. Lanser claimed
that while taking a train trip on the Shasta
Limited on his way to Portland, he observed
mysterious lights on Shasta in the early dawn.
The conductor told him that “the Lemurians”
were holding ceremonies. On his way back to
Portland, Lanser wrote, Lanser spent time in
the Shasta area and found that nearly every¬
one there took the reality of the Lemurians for
granted. “Business men, amateur explorers,
officials, and ranchers in the country sur¬
rounding Shasta spoke freely of the commu¬
nity, and all attested to the weird rituals that
are performed on the mountainside after sun¬
set, midnight and sunrise,” he wrote (De
Camp, 1980). The Lemurians performed
these rituals to celebrate their escape to “Gau¬
tama” (North America). He asserted that
“Prof. Edgar Lucien Larkin,” whom he char¬
acterized as a famous astronomer, had actually
been able to observe Lemurians and their
temples through a telescope. Larkin was in re¬
ality an occult buff who had died some eight

years earlier. Though widely quoted since,
Lanser’s story was a hoax or—more to the
point—a tongue-in-cheek exercise satirizing
the curious beliefs the mystically minded were
circulating about a beautiful but otherwise or¬
dinary natural monument.

In Unveiled Mysteries (1934) Guy Warren
Ballard, writing as Godre Ray King, reported
that in 1930, while working as a mining engi¬
neer at Shasta, he met Saint Germain, an im¬
mortal being who gave him a creamy liquid to
drink. The liquid, Saint Germain explained,
was “Life—Omnipresent Life.” Many other
encounters followed, and Ballard (who died in
1939) soon formed the I AM Activity, a noto¬
rious cultlike organization that combined
Theosophical doctrine with fascist ideology.
Around the same time, occultist Maurice Do-
real was detailing his own Shasta experiences,
which were with the Atlanteans who lived in a
colony seven miles beneath the mountain.
Though the colony had only three hundred
fifty-three inhabitants, it dominated the
Lemurians, four and a half million of whom
lived, essentially, as prisoners of the Atlanteans
even deeper under Shasta. Doreal was unique
in his depiction of the Lemurians as evil and
dangerous.

As Shasta’s legends continued to expand, it
was said that the mountain’s interior housed
two magnificent Lemurian cities, Uetheleme
and Yaktayvia. The latter, some said, was the
source of beautiful bell sounds, which some
had professed to hear emanating from the
mountain. The Yaktayvians are master bell
builders. All the while, occult pilgrims were
arriving in growing numbers to the area;
many would stay. Some claimed to have seen
and communicated with Lemurians and
other extraordinary beings. Others reported
UFO sightings on the mountain. Believers
explained the phenomena as Lemurian air¬
craft or visiting extraterrestrial spacecraft call¬
ing on their friends inside the mountain. At
least one person, Nola Van Valer, swore that
she had met Phylos the Tibetan on the
mountain. On another occasion she spoke
with Saint Germain.

184 Mr. X

See Also: Atlantis; Bonnie; Fairies encountered;
Lemuria; Shaver mystery

Further Reading

Commander X [pseud, of Jim Keith], 1990. Under -
ground Alien Bases. New Brunswick, NJ: Abelard
Productions.

De Camp, L. Sprague, 1980. The Ragged Edge of Sci -
ence. Philadelphia, PA: Owlswick Press.

Frank, Emilie A., 1998. Afo Shasta, California’sMys -
tic Mountain. Hilt, CA: Photografix Publishing.

Kafton-Minkel, Walter, 1989. Subterranean Worlds:
100,000 Years of Dragons, Dwarfs, the Dead, Lost
Races, and UFOs from inside the Earth. Port
Townsend, WA: Loompanics Unlimited.

Tierney, Richard L., 1983. “America’s Mystical
Mount Shasta.” Fate 36, 8 (August): 70-76.

Mr. X

On the afternoon of November 5, 1957,
Reinhold Schmidt, a grain buyer with a
prison record, allegedly encountered the
crew of a landed flying saucer along the
banks of Nebraska’s Platte River. Two
crewmembers ushered him inside, where he
met two other men and two women, all of
whom spoke “high German” to one another
and German-inflected English to Schmidt.
Their captain identified himself as “Mr. X.”
After a brief conversation about America’s
satellite program, Schmidt left the craft,
which then departed.

When Schmidt reported his encounter to
the sheriff’s office in nearby Kearney, officers
went to the site and found footprints as well
as a greasy substance at the supposed landing
site. They also located two empty oil cans not
far away, leading them to suspect a hoax. After
being held overnight in jail, Schmidt was ex¬
amined by two psychiatrists and pronounced
mentally ill. He spent a few days in the Hast¬
ings State Hospital before being released.

Thereafter, he pursued a career on the con-
tactee scene, claiming further contacts with
Mr. X and his associates, who he learned were
from Saturn. His space friends flew him
around the world, to Egypt, to the Antarctic,
and elsewhere. It all ended, however, after he
told a California widow that from a spaceship
he had seen quartz crystals with healing pow¬

ers and persuaded her to invest in a worthless
mining venture. At a trial in Oakland in Oc¬
tober 1961, a young astronomer named Carl
Sagan assured the jury that human life could
not exist on Saturn. Schmidt received a one-
to ten-year sentence for grand theft.

See Also: Contactees

Further Reading

‘“Flying Saucer’ Figure Convicted,” 1961. Oakland
[California] Tribune, October 27.

“The Kearney, Nebraska, ‘Contact’ Claim,” 1957.
CSINews Letter 10 (December 15): 12-13.

Schmidt, Reinhold O., 1963. The Edge of Tomorrow:
A True Account of Experiences with Visitors from
Another Planet. Hollywood, CA: self-published.

MU the Mantis Being

A West Virginia woman who prefers to use
the pseudonym Rebecca Grant says she has
had a lifetime of paranormal experiences, in¬
cluding missing-time episodes and apparent
UFO abductions. When she was forty years
old, aliens revealed themselves to her. At first
the communications were purely telepathic.
After two years they began to appear physi¬
cally to her. These appearances, always brief,
at first frightened her, but in due course she
became friendly with a being who looked like
a giant praying mantis, a kind of entity some¬
times reported by abductees. The mantis
being, apparently possessing a sense of humor,
conveyed the idea that he would like to be
called MU, short for “Master of the Uni¬
verse,” though Grant said she would prefer
that he be “MU-Bug... to help keep things
in perspective.” MU communicates telepathi-
cally and is not physically present during the
communications.

MU told her that he and his race had helped
life evolve on Earth. Close to one hundred dif¬
ferent alien groups visit Earth, some from other
places in the galaxy, some from parallel uni¬
verses. They are on Earth because of their con¬
cern about what human beings are doing to the
planet’s environment. Though they possess the
means to do so, they are not repairing the dam¬
age because humans have to learn to do that
themselves; alien help would only prolong hu-

Muller’s Martians 185

manitys existence. “We might survive long
enough to find an even grander way to destroy
ourselves,” Grant says MU has observed, “one
that could harm worlds other than our own.
These beings feel that. . . they would be con¬
demning themselves to a violent confrontation
with us in the future.” The aliens have taken a
middle course. They abduct people and remove
some of their DNA, combining it with the
DNA of various alien races; thus, “something
of the human race will continue.” Others are
trying to implant spiritual beliefs and psychic
perceptions into the brains of humans in the
hope that greater wisdom will lead them to sur¬
vival and peace.

According to MU, alien science indicates
that Earth faces a bleak future of ecological
collapse, geophysical cataclysms, and political
and social upheaval, which may lead to
atomic and biological warfare. None of this is
certain, only probable. If these things happen,
MU says, the aliens may “remove a group of
women and children from the surface of the
Earth to protect them for the purposes of pro¬
creation.” These would all be abductees whose
genetic make-up had already been altered.

See Also: Abductions by UFOs; Insectoids

Further Reading

Lewels, Joe, 1997. The God Hypothesis: Extraterres -
trial Life and Its Implications for Science and Reli -
gion. Mill Spring, NC: Wild Flower Press.

Muller’s Martians

A medium’s contacts with Martians are the
subject of a classic early work on abnormal
psychology, Theodore Flournoy’s From India
to the Planet Mars (1899). Flournoy, a promi¬
nent Swiss psychologist, gives the medium the
pseudonym Helene Smith in his book, but
her real name was Catherine Elise Muller.

Born in 1861, Muller possessed a consider¬
able imagination and a keen intelligence. She
grew up in a family in which psychic and vi¬
sionary experiences were common, and she
herself had a number of them. Friends drew
her attention to spiritism, and soon she be¬
came a medium. Through her, such historical
figures as the great novelist Victor Hugo and
the legendary occultist Cagliostro spoke, spin¬
ning what Flournoy characterizes as “complex
sagas.” Her Martian adventures began only
after a friend remarked, in her presence, on
something he had read recently. It was a state¬
ment by the popular science writer Camille
Flammarion that “Martian humankind and
Earth humankind may one day enter into
communication with the other.” The friend
expressed the hope that such a thing would
happen.

Soon afterward, Muller informed him that
she had made contact with Martians. These
encounters occurred in a variety of mental
states, including sleep. Flournoy was led to
the conclusion that, at least at some level of
her psyche, Muller was always living with the
Martians. The communications and experi¬
ences were voluminous. She had many Mart¬
ian friends and was often on that planet inter¬
acting with them and observing everything
around her. She even produced, albeit in
piecemeal fashion, a Martian language that
Flourney recognized as an “infantile travesty
of French.”

See Also: Allingham’s Martian; Aurora Martian;
Brown’s Martians; Flopkins’s Martians; Khauga;
Martian bees; Monka; Shaw’s Martians; Smead’s
Martians; Wilcox’s Martians

Further Reading

Flournoy, Theodore, 1963. From India to the Planet
Mars: A Study of a Case of Somnambidism with
Glossolalia. New Hyde Park, NY: University
Books.

Noma

In 1961, investigating the Brown Mountain
lights (believed by most authorities to be re¬
fractions of distant light sources such as pass¬
ing automobiles) near Morgan ton, North
Carolina, Ralph Lael discovered that if he sent
telepathic messages to the lights, they would
respond. One light urged him to enter a door
concealed on the mountainside, where the en¬
tities responsible for the lights operated. Lael
passed into an eight-foot-square room with
transparent walls. There a voice told him that
the human race had come into being on a
planet once known as Pewam, now the aster¬
oid belt between Mars and Jupiter. On a sub¬
sequent visit not long afterward, Lael boarded
a flying saucer and was taken to Venus. There,
besides meeting the direct descendants of Pe-
wamites, he encountered a lovely, scantily clad
woman named Noma. His hosts also showed
him footage of Pewam’s destruction and of
early Earth humans.

Further Reading

Machlin, Milt, and Timothy Green Beckley, 1981.

UFO. New York: Quick Fox.

Nordics

Nordic is a name given to a kind of alien
being reported in UFO encounters that range

from contact claims to close encounters of the
third kind to abductions. The term did not,
however, come into general use among ufolo¬
gists until the 1980s. Nordics are said to re¬
semble Scandinavians, at least in a generic
sense; they are tall, blond, fair-skinned
(though sometimes described as deeply
tanned), and attractive-looking. Witnesses
often claim that their eyes are different from
northern Europeans in being somewhat
slanted or even almond-shaped.

The beings that would later be called
Nordics were first known as Space Brothers—
often, though not always, from Venus—when
1950s contactees such as George Adamski and
Howard Menger reported meetings with
friendly extraterrestrials, with whom they
traveled into space and had other adventures.
Though conservative ufologists rejected these
claims as absurd hoaxes, generally similar fig¬
ures were reported in the testimony of wit¬
nesses who did not fit the contactees’ flam¬
boyant profiles.

In one such incident, a farmer near Linha
Vista, Brazil, while working in a field heard a
sewing-machine sound. When he looked to
its source, it turned out to be a strange craft,
“shaped like a tropical helmet,” hovering
nearby. A man could be seen inside the UFO,
another stood near a fence, and a third was

187

188 Nostradamus

approaching the witness, who was sufficiently
startled to drop his hoe. The being smiled and
picked up the hoe, handing it back to the
farmer before he and his companions returned
to the ship and flew away. The beings, clad in
light brown coveralls, had long blond hair,
pale skin, and slanted eyes. The farmer, who
knew nothing of flying saucers, thought the
craft and its occupants were from the United
States.

Typically in these kinds of close encoun¬
ters, the Nordics were not communicative,
just silent and distant; they were not un¬
friendly but not forthcoming either. Ufolo¬
gists collected hundreds of such accounts
from all over the world. As abduction reports
rose to prominence in later years, Nordics
showed up in many stories, almost always
seen in association with little gray aliens and
in circumstances that suggested that they oc¬
cupied a higher position in the otherworldly
chain of command than did their smaller fel¬
lows. One writer on the abduction phenome¬
non, David M. Jacobs, believes that “the evi¬
dence clearly suggests that the Nordics are
most probably adult hybrids, the products of
human/alien mating” (Jacobs, 1998).

Nordics live on in current contactee lore,
where they are assumed to be genuine extrater¬
restrials, perhaps representing the race that
seeded the Earth and gave rise to modern Homo
sapiens. Nordics, according to Billy Meier and
other post-Adamski friends of the space people,
come from the Pleiades star system.

See Also: Abductions by UFOs; Adamski, George;
Close encounters of the third kind; Contactees;
Hybrid beings; Meier, Eduard “Billy”; Menger,
Howard; Waltons abduction

Further Reading

Adamski, George, 1955. Inside the Space Ships. New
York: Abelard-Schuman.

Bowen, Charles, ed., 1974. The Humanoids. Lon¬
don: Futura Publications.

Jacobs, David M., 1998. The Threat. New York:
Simon and Schuster.

Menger, Howard, 1959. From Outer Space to You.
Clarksburg, WV: Saucerian Books.

Randles, Jenny, 1988. Abduction: Over 200 Docu -
mented UFO Kidnappings Investigated. London:
Robert Hale.

Stevens, Wendelle C., 1983. UFO. . . Contact from
the Pleiades—A Preliminary Investigative Report —
The Report on an Ongoing Contact. Tucson, AZ:
Wendelle C. Stevens.

Nostradamus

Nostradamus—Michael de Nostradame (1503—
1566)—was a French physician, astrologer,
and counselor to Kings Henry II and Charles
IX. He is remembered for his prophecies of
world events, culminating in the Second
Coming of Christ in 2000. According to an
Indiana woman, he returned to this world in
1996 as a channeled entity after living on the
Great Central Sun since his death.

A woman who identifies herself only as Pati
reports that on a Friday night in July 1996,
she was sitting in on a channeling session with
like-minded friends when a message came
through from an anxious-sounding Nos¬
tradamus. Though Pati had never paid much
attention to Nostradamus or his prophecies
before, she felt a strong, immediate connec¬
tion. Nostradamus communicated only
briefly, but before he withdrew, the channel¬
ing group assured him that he was welcome to
come back anytime he wished to do so.

The next day, while on a long drive through
the country, Pati felt Nostradamus’s spirit inside
her, seeing and hearing all that passed through
her eyes and ears. He asked questions about
everything around them. Over the next two
months, Pati felt other “energies” enter her. She
suspected that they were friends and associates
of Nostradamus’s from the Great Central Sun.
“Judging by the questions that were asked,” Pati
writes, “these energies either had not been on
this planet before or, if they had been, it was so
long ago that nothing looked familiar apart
from the trees, rocks and water. They asked
questions about how houses were built, why
this or that particular shape? What materials did
we use? On and on, they went, asking about
planes, cars, barns and llamas, and why do peo¬
ple MOW their grass!” (Pati, 1999).

On two occasions, Pati verbally channeled
Nostradamus. On the first, he expressed satis¬
faction with his life now and praised the ef-

Nostradamus, shown in magicians garb in his laboratory, writing about astrology (Bettmann/Corbis)

forts of Pad and like-minded people who were
making life on Earth better. On the second,
he identified two women in the channeling
group as his wife and servant in his Earth in¬
carnation. Ele apologized for treating them as
less than his equals.

See Also: Channeling
Further Reading

Pati, 1999. “Nostradamus Comes Back... And
Likes What He Sees!” Planet Lightivorker (Sep¬
tember/October). http://www.planetlightworker.
com/articlefarm/pati/article 1 .htm.

Octopus aliens

While doing chores in his barnyard at 6 A.M.
on August 16, 1968, a Serra de Almos, Spain,
farmer noticed a light about half a mile away
Thinking it was from a stalled car, he walked
over to help what he assumed to be a stranded
motorist. The “car” turned out to be a globe-
shaped object hovering just above the ground.
Nearby were two bizarre-looking creatures
that resembled octopuses. They were light in
color and three feet tall, and they were dash¬
ing on “four or five legs” toward the UFO,
which shot away as soon as they entered it.

Journalists and ufologists who examined
the site soon afterward found an abundance
of burned grass. They also reported that their
watches had abruptly ceased operating.

See Also: Close encounters of the third kind

Further Reading

Ballester Olmos, Vicente-Juan, 1976. A Catalogue of
200 Type-I UFO Events in Spain and Portugal.
Evanston, IL: Center for UFO Studies.

Ogatta

Ogatta is, in the channeling of North Car¬
olina psychic Greta Woodrew, one of five
planets in a “jorpah” (solar system) in another
galaxy. (The other planets are Oshan, Archa,
Mennon, and Tchauvi.) Woodrew, a wealthy

professional woman who grew up and lived
much of her life in New York City and Con¬
necticut, discovered her connection with
Ogatta while exploring her paranormal tal¬
ents, prominently including metal-bending,
with noted parapsychologist Andrija Puha-
rich. Under hypnosis on December 17, 1976,
she underwent an out-of-body experience, in
which she encountered a figure with both
human and bird features. It was clad in a silver
suit and had marvelous, golden eyes with a
loving expression. Via telepathy she learned
that he was Hshames from the Ogatta jorpah
(his actual home planet was Mennon).

Soon, under hypnosis and then by chan¬
neling, Woodrew was communicating with
other entities, one named Ogatta after the
planet. She would form a particularly close as¬
sociation with a female Ogattan named Tauri.
She learned that many cosmic civilizations,
including the Ogattans, are visiting the Earth
in ships; the Ogattans call their ships “gattae.”
Woodrew herself had a dual existence. In one
aspect she lived on Earth; in another she lived
on Ogatta as “Plura.” Plura had made the de¬
cision to live—or at least to have a part of her
life—on Earth in order to prepare earthlings
for the coming Earth changes that will devas¬
tate much of the planet before a new age
brings peace and harmony.

191

192 OINTS

In time Woodrew learned, via recovered
“memories,” that she had been interacting with
the Ogattans since her childhood. Her first
contact took place in the early 1930s when she
was three and a half years old. For the next six
years, she had many experiences with space
people. She was flown to a beautiful planet
where she could “hear colors” and “see music”
because, like her fellow Ogattans, she was free
of the limitations of human physiology; thus,
her brain processed stimuli differently.

Though her contacts were overwhelmingly
with Ogattans, on occasion she met beings
from other worlds. Once she had an out-of-
body encounter with beings who looked half¬
human and half-fish. These entities seemed
friendly, but, on a handful of other occasions,
she dealt with extraterrestrials who were not so
amiable. Some believed the Earth to be of no
significance, thus its problems were of no con¬
cern to major players in the larger cosmic order.

Woodrew became a lecturer on the New
Age circuit, wrote a self-published book, and
published a newsletter, The Woodrew Update.
After the Ogattans warned them that they
would have to move to preserve their safety
during the coming geological upheavals,
Woodrew and her husband, Dick Smolowe,
bought a property in western North Carolina
in 1982. They moved from Westport, Con¬
necticut, to the survivalist compound they
named Reisha Way. In 1988, Doubleday re¬
leased Woodrew’s book Memories ofTomorrow.
A few years later, Woodrow and Smolowe
moved to Winston-Salem for health reasons.

Further Reading

Heard, Alex, 1999. Apocalypse Pretty Soon: Travels in
End-Time America. New York: W. W. Norton and
Company.

Woodrew, Greta, 1981. On a Slide of Light. Black
Mountain, NC: New Age Press.

-, 1988. Memories of Tomorrow. New York:

Dolphin/Doubleday.

OINTS

“OINTS” are “Other Intelligences” in an
acronym coined by maverick biologist and

anomalist Ivan T. Sanderson. To Sanderson
OINTS are any beings that are on Earth but
are not human. He did not confine his defini¬
tion simply to extraterrestrial visitors, who in
his view are only one among a variety of be¬
ings present on this planet. Poltergeists—in¬
visible, destructive spirits—are one kind of
OINT. So are the entities who, so he theo¬
rized in Invisible Residents (1970), dwell under
the oceans, occasionally snatching ships,
planes, and their crews in places such as the
Bermuda Triangle. (“Could there have
evolved a technological civilization . . . under¬
water? I am afraid I have to say that. . . there
is no logical reason for stating that there could
not be.”) He also believed that invisible di¬
mensions or parallel universes surround hu¬
mans. From these other dimensions, entities
pop in and out of human reality with regular¬
ity, manifesting as everything from fairies to
UFOs. They shift their shapes to whatever
form may be appropriate to the occasion and
the circumstance.

Curiously, however, Sanderson held a dim
view of all such visitors, not because he feared
they might be unfriendly but because “the
OINTS are . . . incredibly and abysmally stu -
pidf He suspected that they were so advanced
that their technology now controlled them
and that they have given up mental activity,
just as technology has caused humans to re¬
duce much of their physical activity. “That
they are for the most part overcivilized and
quite mad,” he wrote, “is, in my opinion, an
open-ended question but quite probable. Per¬
haps, we will never be able to cope with them
until we, too, all go quite mad.”

See Also: Bermuda Triangle; Fairies encountered

Further Reading

Sanderson, Ivan T., 1970. Invisible Residents: A Dis -
quisition upon Certain Matters Maritime, and the
Possibility ofIntelligent Life under the Waters of the
Earth. New York: World Publishing Company.

Old Hag

The “Old Hag” is a folk expression—popular,
for example, in Newfoundland—for the par-

Henri Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1781 (The Detroit Institute of the Arts, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Bert L. Smokier and Mr. and
Mrs. Lawrence A. Fleishman)

ticular experience that gave rise to the word
“nightmare.” Nightmare has come to be a
synonym for “bad dream,” but traditionally
nightmare (from the Anglo-Saxon nicht
[night] and mara [incubus or succubus]) re¬
ferred to a specific nocturnal experience. A
menacing supernatural entity, often perceived
as an ugly witch, enters a bedroom and sits on
the witness’s chest, leaving him or her with the
sensation of being crushed. All the while the
victim lies paralyzed and helpless.

Though the experience occurs frequently
to Americans—one in six, according to a sci¬
entist who has studied the phenomenon—
American culture has no name for it. Thus,
those who undergo it are at a loss to under¬
stand it or to put it into any larger context.
Many, having never heard of others’ experi¬
ences, are left wondering about their sanity.

The Old Hag is the subject of a classic
work, The Terror That Comes in the Night
(1982), by David J. Hufford, a medical scien¬
tist and folklorist at Pennsylvania State Uni¬
versity. Hufford uses the experience, among
other things, to scrutinize the way psycholo¬
gists have dealt with such reports and to ex¬
amine the trustworthiness of eyewitness testi¬
mony to anomalous events. Most scientists
and scholars have sought to explain Old Hag
attacks as the result of perceptual errors, faulty
memories, lies, psychotic episodes, or halluci¬
nations shaped by images in the claimants’
cultural environment. According to Hufford,
they have often discarded witness testimony,
resulting in what Hufford charges was an ef¬
fort to reinvent the experience so that it could
be “explained.” Referring to a study by early
psychoanalyst and Freud biographer Ernest

194 Oleson’s giants

Jones, Hufford says that “one can hardly dis¬
tinguish the experiences themselves from their
interpretations.”

Hufford argues that if would-be explainers
had listened to what the witnesses reported
about the particular symptoms of Old Hag
experience, they might have been able to ex¬
plain it sooner. Research in the 1960s and
1970s in sleep paralysis both underscores the
accuracy of the testimony and explains most
of it, though, so far, not the peculiar fact that
the contents of the experience are consistent no
matter to whom or in what cultural context
they occur.

In Hufford’s judgment, too much scholarly
writing on extraordinary experience reflects
“unexamined prejudices and makes facile as¬
sumptions about cultural processes,” thus
confusing rather than clarifying issues.

Old Hag sleep paralysis may explain at
least some abduction and other ostensibly
UFO-related “bedroom visitations.” For ex¬
ample, John A. Keel, author of several books
on UFOs, has written of his own encounters
with strange entities, including one in which
“I woke up in the middle of the night to find
myself unable to move, with a huge dark ap¬
parition standing over me” (Keel, 1970).

Addressing the abduction phenomenon,
Hufford has said, “If the paralysis attacks, as
described by abductees, are directly linked to
abductions, there is every reason to believe
that the abduction phenomenon has great his¬
torical depth and is associated in complex
ways with other classes of anomalous experi¬
ence” (Hufford, 1994).

See Also: Abductions by UFOs; Keel, John Alva

Further Reading

Hufford, David J., 1982. The Terror That Comes in
the Night: An Experienced-Centered Study of Su -
pernatural Assault Traditions. Philadelphia: Uni¬
versity of Pennsylvania Press.

-, 1994. “Awakening Paralyzed in the Presence

of a Strange ‘Visitor’.” In Andrea Pritchard,
David E. Pritchard, John E. Mack, Pam Kasey,
and Claudia Yapp, eds. Alien Discussions: Proceed -
ings of the Abdtiction Study Conference, 348-354.
Cambridge, MA: North Cambridge Press.

Keel, John A., 1970. Strange Creatures from Time and
Space. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Gold Medal.

Oleson’s giants

On May 2, 1897, during a spate of mysteri¬
ous “airship” sightings that some popular
speculation tied to possible visitors from
other planets, the Houston Post published a
letter from John Leander of El Campo, Texas.
Leander related the story of a local man,
identified only as Mr. Oleson, an elderly, re¬
tired sailor who once served on Danish ves¬
sels. According to Leander, in September
1862 Oleson had witnessed the crash of a
mysterious craft and seen the bodies of the
giant beings who had flown it.

At the time the incident took place, Oleson
was serving as mate on the brig Christine on
the Indian Ocean. A furious storm erupted
and raged for hours until, finally, a wave
washed over the ship, and Oleson and five
companions were swept onto a small, rocky is¬
land. All were injured, and one soon died.
The island was devoid of life, and the men re¬
signed themselves to their deaths. As they sat
hopeless at the base of a cliff, they witnessed a
bizarre and terrifying sight: an immense flying
ship, apparently out of control and about to
crash, was heading directly toward them. For¬
tunately, the wind blew it off course, and it
smashed against the rocks a few hundred
yards away.

Overcoming their deep fear, the sailors
made their way to the wreckage. The ma¬
chine, which they deduced had been the size
of a battleship, lay in a shapeless mass, reveal¬
ing little except that the craft had had four
large wings. There were things that looked
like tools and furniture, evidently from the
ship’s interior, and the men opened boxes cov¬
ered with unusual characters. Inside the
boxes, they uncovered nourishing food.

“But their horror was intensified,” Leander
wrote, “when they found the bodies of more
than a dozen men dressed in garments of
strange fashion and texture. The bodies were a
dark bronze color, but the strangest feature of
all was the immense size of the men. They had
no means of measuring their bodies, but esti¬
mated them to be more than twelve feet high.
Their hair and beards were also long and as

Orthon 195

soft and silky as the hair of an infant”
(Bullard, 1982). The sight so unsettled one of
the men that he was driven mad. He
promptly hurled himself off into the sea,
where he drowned.

The survivors retreated from the scene, and
it took them two days to restore their courage
sufficiently to return. They rummaged for
food and then dragged the giants’ bodies off
the cliff and into the water. Using pieces of
the spaceship, they built a raft and set out on
the now-still ocean. Sixty hours later, they
came upon a Russian vessel heading for Aus¬
tralia. Before they could reach port, however,
three more of Oleson’s companions died from
their injuries and shock.

“Fortunately as a partial confirmation of
the truth of his story,” Leander wrote, “Mr.
Oleson took from one of the bodies a finger
ring of immense size. It is made of a com¬
pound of metals unknown to any jeweler who
has seen it, and is set with two reddish stones,
the names of which are unknown to anyone
who has ever examined it. The ring was taken
from the thumb of the owner and measure
two and one-quarter inches in diameter.”

Leander’s yarn was one of many told in
the spring of 1897 about airships and their
supposed crews. Newspapers all over Amer¬
ica carried comparable tall tales, including
one alleging a Martian’s crash-landing and
his subsequent burial in a small north-Texas
town.

See Also: Aurora Martian; Michigan giant; Wilson

Further Reading

Bullard, Thomas E., ed. 1982. The Airship File: A
Collection of Texts Concerning Phantom Airships
and Other UFOs, Gathered from Newspapers and
Periodicals Mostly during the Hundred Years Prior
to Kenneth Arnold’s Sighting. Bloomington, IN:
self-published.

Olliana Olliana Alliano

Speaking at a contactee conference in 1982,
Dave Schultz, an electrician from Louisville,
Colorado, related a lifetime of interactions
with extraterrestrials, among them the Olliana
Olliana Alliano. The Olliana Olliana Alliano

are forty inches tall, humanlike in appearance
except for a slightly larger head. Schultz called
them “the good people,” guardians of the
Earth. It was Olliana Olliana Alliano who
died in the 1948 spaceship crash at Aztec,
New Mexico, chronicled in Frank Scully’s Be -
hind the Flying Saucers (1950).

This alien group is here to “get the vibra¬
tions of the planet up to a level in which we
can join the space federation.” Before that
happens, humans have to shed their violent,
warlike, greedy ways. The Olliana Olliana Al¬
liano have contacted every political leader on
Earth to deliver this message.

Further Reading

Sprinkle, R. Leo, ed., 1982. Proceedings: Rocky
Mountain Conference on UFO Investigation.
Laramie, WY: School of Extended Studies, Uni¬
versity of Wyoming.

Orthon

Orthon was the name George Adamski—or,
more accurately, his ghostwriter Charlotte
Blodget—gave to the Venusian Adamski met
in the desert of southern California on No¬
vember 20, 1952. Space people, Adamski ex¬
plained, never call themselves by name when
interacting with human beings because they
have “an entirely different concept of names as
we use them” (Adamski, 1955). In that first
encounter, Adamski communicated with the
being he called Orthon via gestures, sign lan¬
guage, and snatches of telepathy, during
which the Venusian expressed concern about
earthlings’ warlike ways. Adamski saw Orthon
again briefly when he flew overhead in his
scout craft the following December 13.

He next met Orthon in the early morning
hours of Februaryl4, 1953, when two space¬
men picked him up at a Los Angeles hotel and
drove him into the desert to an awaiting
saucer. As he approached the ship, he saw Or¬
thon, who was finishing some repair work.
Seeing “a very small amount of molten metal
that he had thrown out,” Adamski scooped up
the object. When his companions asked him
why he was doing that, he said he wanted

196 Oxalc

concrete proof of his contacts. Orthon ex¬
plained, though, that “you will find that this
alloy contains the same on all planets”
(Adamski, 1955). They boarded the ship
together and flew into space, where Adamski
and Orthon—now speaking lucid English, as
had not been the case in their first en¬
counter—engaged in extended conversation.

A third meeting with Orthon took place
on August 23, 1954, after the same two space¬
men, Firkon of Mars and Ramu of Saturn,
picked up Adamski at his home and took him
to a spacecraft. Adamski was reunited not
only with Orthon but also with other extra¬
terrestrials, including the beautiful women 11-
muth (a Martian) and Kalna (a Venusian)
who had been aboard the ship he had entered
earlier. This time Orthon showed Adamski
scenes from the Venusian surface. The Venu-
sians, Orthon said, have an average lifetime of
a thousand years.

On April 25, 1955, Adamski flew into
space again with Orthon. A crewmember used
Adamski’s camera to take photographs of a
nearby Venusian Mother Ship into which
Adamski had transferred. Two of the blurry
results are reproduced in Inside the Space
Ships. One of them, according to the caption,
shows a Venusian looking out of a porthole,
Adamski out of a second, though to the un¬
trained eye the faces look like no more than
blobs of light. Lou Zinsstag, a Swiss woman
who was close to Adamski and eventually be¬
came his biographer, reported that one day in
1959, while the two were conversing, he
pulled out his wallet and extracted from it a
photograph of Orthon in profile. Zinsstag,
who was allowed to study it briefly, was struck
by the figure’s pronounced chin.

In the early 1960s, according to Adamski,
a new group of space people replaced the old
one. In later years, after his death, old associ¬
ates such as Blodget, Madeleine Rodeffer,
Fred Steckling, and Steve Within made
claims of having met Orthon, but Alice
Wells, Adamski’s executor and head of the
George Adamski Foundation, rejected their
assertions.

Further Reading

Adamski, George, 1955. Inside the Space Ships. New
York: Abelard-Schuman.

Good, Timothy, 1998. Alien Base: Earth’s Encounters
with Extraterrestrials. London: Century.

Hallet, Marc, 1997. “Adamski and His Believers: A
Reminiscence.” In Hilary Evans and Dennis
Stacy, eds. UFOs 1947—1997: From Arnold to the
Abductees: Fifty Years of Flying Saucers, 28-34.
London: John Brown Publishing.

Leslie, Desmond, and George Adamski, 1953. Flying
Saucers Have Landed. New York: British Book
Centre.

Zinsstag, Lou, and Timothy Good, 1983. George
Adamski—The Untold Story. Beckenham, Kent,
England: Ceti Publications.

Oxalc

Oxalc is from the planet Morlen, settled long
ago by human beings from the Orion system.
They sought to establish a supercolony. The
planet now houses six large cities in which be¬
ings from many worlds, including Earth, cur¬
rently reside. Oxalc oversees forty-nine extra¬
terrestrial guides involved in Mission Rama.
According to one source, “The word RAMA
contains a vibratory activator and was chosen
forty-two hundred years ago. RA represents
the Sun or irradiation and MA represents
Mother Earth. The mantra Rama means Irra¬
diating Light on Earth” (Edilver, n.d.). Mis¬
sion Rama’s purpose is to help planets in tran¬
sition, such as Earth (also known as Merla), as
they enter the fourth dimension.

Oxalc’s presence on Earth became known
in 1973 after a group of Peruvian flying-saucer
enthusiasts led by Sixto Paz Wells decided to
try to establish psychic communications with
extraterrestrials. The initial contacts took place
through automatic writing from an entity who
called himself Oxalc. Oxalc gave a specific date
and place where he would meet them person¬
ally. The group went to the location, a coastal
region thirty-seven miles south of Lima, and
were shocked to see a brilliantly lighted, ham-
burger-shaped metallic craft hovering less than
three hundred feet over their heads. Their fear
and excitement were so intense that Oxalc,

Oz Factor 197

communicating telepathically, informed them
that no meeting would take place; before one
could happen, they would have to learn how
to control their emotions.

The messages continued and began to circu¬
late through the Spanish-speaking world. They
described the nature of the cosmos, Earth’s se¬
cret history, and human beings’ spiritual na¬
ture. The teachings were circulated under the
name Mission Rama, organized as a nonprofit
corporation. They hold that there are three dif¬
ferent universes: material (Septennial), mental
(Eternal), and spiritual (Mental). Our own
Milky Way is under the direction of twenty-
four highly evolved beings, the Elders of the
Galaxy. Beneath them are advanced civiliza¬
tions which actively assist lesser but developing
races. Each of these takes on a particular task,
as Genetic Engineers, Keepers, Guardians, In¬
structors, and the like. “Galaxy M-31,” in the
Andromeda constellation, is the seat of an ex¬
tremely important council where representa¬
tives of a number of galaxies in our region of
space deliberate. The council is called the
Council of Nine, and the beings sitting on it
are the Nine of Andromeda. They, along with
the twenty-four Elders of each galaxy, comprise
the Great White Brotherhood of the Star.

Members of the Earth’s Mission Rama have
reported extraordinary experiences, not just
UFO sightings but otherworldly journeys
through artificially constructed space-time
portals (Xendras). “Many others received their
‘Cosmic Names,’ whose pronunciation is in
tune with the total nature of each individual’s
soul,” one document states (Edilver, n.d.).

Further Reading

Edilver [pseud, of Giorgio Piacenza], 1992. “Mission
Rama.” Coral Gables, FL: self-published.

Oz Factor

“Oz Factor” is a phrase coined by British ufol¬
ogist Jenny Randles, who calls it the “sensation
of being isolated, or transported from the real
world into a different environmental frame¬
work.” Randles noted its presence in a number

of UFO cases she investigated. It was as if, she
wrote, witnesses were “being transported tem¬
porarily from our world into another, where
reality is but slightly different. ... I call it ‘the
Oz Factor,’ after the fairytale land of Oz”
(Randles, 1983). She suspects that in many os¬
tensibly straightforward UFO encounters, wit¬
nesses are in an altered state of consciousness.

In Oz Factor incidents, an individual may
witness a spectacular UFO display or even
landing and contact in a public space at a time
when other persons should be about. Yet
other people will be weirdly absent, and a
zone of silence will surround the scene. The
witness may feel as if he or she has been “cho¬
sen” to view the object.

Such phenomena have also been reported
in the context of men in black encounters. For
example, Peter Rojcewicz tells of an experi¬
ence he underwent one afternoon in Novem¬
ber 1980, when he was doing research on a
Ph.D. dissertation in folklore at the Univer¬
sity of Pennsylvania library. His subject was
UFOs. A strange man dressed in black inter¬
rupted his work and engaged him in a dis¬
jointed exchange about flying saucers. The
stranger then seemed to disappear. “I was
highly excited and finally walked around the
stacks to the reference desk and nobody was
behind the desk,” Rojcewicz wrote. He could
find no one else in the library anywhere, a sit¬
uation he regarded as virtually incomprehen¬
sible. Fighting panic, he returned to where he
had been sitting. “In about an hour I rose to
leave the library,” he recalled. “There were
two librarians behind each of the two desks!”
(Rojcewicz, 1987).

An American psychiatric social worker
writing under a pseudonym recounts a life¬
time of encounters with a range of other¬
worldly beings. She says,

I apparently entered into an altered state when
encounters occurred. It seemed to be an altered
energy or time field created by the beings.
Everything fell silent. The air felt heavy, like
liquid crystal, and it seemed to carry nonverbal
information between the beings and myself.

198 Oz Factor

From left to right: Peter Brookesmith; Jenny Randles, the ufologist who coined the term “Oz Factor”; and Jerome Clark at
Fortean Times UnConvention95 (Lisa Anders/Fortean Picture Library)

Time slowed and eddied in strange ways. Be¬
ings usually informed me (telepathically in
most cases) that I would not remember the
events until much later. As they communicated
this, an opaque screen formed in my mind,
and the encounter began to feel dim, even
while it was still occurring. Additionally, when
the encounter ended, the altered field also dis¬
solved. Merely exiting the field also cloaked the
memory. (Oakman, 1999)

Further Reading

Oakman, Lisa [pseud.], 1999. “UFO Beings, Folk¬
lore, and Mythology: Personal Experiences.” In -
ternational UFO Reporter 24, 4 (Winter): 7-12.

Randles, Jenny, 1983. UFO Reality: A Critical Look
at the Physical Evidence. London: Robert Hale.

Rojcewicz, Peter M., 1987. “The ‘Men in Black’ Ex¬
perience and Tradition: Analogues with the Tra¬
ditional Devil Hypothesis.” Journal of American
Folklore 100 (April/June): 148-160.

Paul 2

Paul Solem, an Idaho rancher, first heard from
Paul 2—though he did not know his name at
the time—in 1948 when a mental voice from
a flying saucer told him, “You will hear from
us later” (Clark, 1971). Four years later Solem
met Paul 2, a self-identified “angel” from
Venus. Solem was informed that he had been
a Venusian in a previous life and that his mis¬
sion in the present incarnation was to work
with North and South American Indians to
prepare the City of Zion. A great cataclysm
was coming, and in its wake a utopian society
would be built with the aid of space people
and their earthly allies.

Solem surfaced publicly in July 1969 at the
Fort Flail Indian Reservation in Idaho, where
he and several Indian associates declared in a
series of campfire meetings that flying saucers
had arrived to fulfill a Flopi prophecy about
the Day of Purification. According to Flopi
tradition, a great fiery explosion would herald
the coming of the True White Brother. Only
those who had remained true to the ancient
Hopi ways would be spared.

Moving his operation to Flotevilla, Ari¬
zona, where the Hopi Sun Clan was head¬
quartered, Solem worked with the 106-year-
old Chief Dan Katchongva to integrate flying
saucers into the tribe’s traditional faith.

Katchongva was a friend of contactee and
fringe archaeologist George Hunt William¬
son, author of books speculating about the re¬
lationship of native religions and visiting ex¬
traterrestrials. Younger tribal members resisted
Katchongva and Solem’s efforts, though other
residents of the area were claiming UFO
sightings that they took to be evidence of the
prophecy’s imminent fulfillment.

Solem announced that Paul 2 would bring
in flying saucers for all to see on four occa¬
sions, beginning on Easter Sunday 1971.
Their failure to appear on the first scheduled
date destroyed Solem’s credibility, and soon
afterward Katchongva was ousted from his
position as leader of the Sun Clan. He died
the following year. Solem lapsed into obscu¬
rity. His last known public appearance was on
July 21, 1990, in the resort town of Lava Hot
Springs, Idaho, where he spoke to a small
crowd and tried without success to entice
saucers to fly overhead.

See Also: Contactees; Williamson, George Hunt

Further Reading

Clark, Jerome, 1971. “Indian Prophecy and the
Prescott UFOs.” Fate 24, 4 (April): 54-61.

Davis, Rick, 1990. “Would You Believe, Flying
Saucers over Lava?” Idaho State Journal
(Pocatello, July 15).

Katchongva, Chief Dan, 1970. Hopi Prophecy.
Hotevilla, AZ: Hopi Independent Nation.

199

200 Philip

Kimball, Richard W., 1995. “American Indian
Prophecies Confirm the Reality of Flying
Saucers.” Prescott [Arizona] Daily Courier Gazette
(December 24).

Waters, Frank, 1963. Book of the Hopi. New York:
Viking Press.

Williamson, George Flunt, 1959. Road in the Sky.
London: Neville Spearman.

Philip

“Philip” is an imaginary entity said to have
been given a degree of physical reality when a
Toronto-based parapsychological group con¬
sciously “invented” him. He was part of an ex¬
periment intended to demonstrate that men¬
tal energies can create the sorts of entities
reported in spiritualist seances and poltergeist
episodes.

In September 1972, members of the
Toronto Society for Psychical Research in¬
vented Philip, laying out a detailed personal
biography. A pro-royal aristocrat during En¬
gland’s Civil War, Philip fell in love with a
Gypsy woman but lost her when authorities
tried and burned her at the stake as a witch.
His failure to find a way to save her filled him
with guilt and grief and prevented his soul
from passing on to the afterlife, leaving it an
earthbound spirit. The group, whose mem¬
bers included psychologist A.R.G. Owen and
his wife Iris, began to meditate on Philip in
hopes that he would “appear” to them in
some fashion. Nothing happened for a year.

Then the group decided to try a different
tactic. Members decided to imitate the meth¬
ods of nineteenth-century spiritualist circles,
on the theory that skepticism inhibited the
occurrence of paranormal phenomena. Like
the earlier spiritualist sitters, they sat in a cir¬
cle, sang, or otherwise tried to create an at¬
mosphere conducive to the manifestation of
the unknown. Within a few weeks, they began
hearing raps from the table. They were able to
communicate with the knocker by asking sim¬
ple “yes” or “no” questions. Once the table ap¬
parently levitated. Eventually, Philip seemed
to take on a personality of his own, indepen¬
dent of the one the group had assigned him.

He would reject or contradict his “life” story.
Once, when a member reminded him that he
was purely imaginary, he disappeared for
some weeks, to reappear only when members
managed to recapture some semblance of be¬
lief in his actual existence.

On one occasion, the group demonstrated
Philip’s manifestations on a television pro¬
gram. Iris Owen and another member, Mar¬
garet Sparrow, wrote a book on the episode,
which they believed demonstrated the reality
not of ghosts but of psychokinesis. One subse¬
quent observer, however, cautions that though
“potentially highly significant, the experiment
has not been repeated by other researchers”
(Dash, 1997).

Further Reading

Dash, Mike, 1997. Borderlands. London: Heine-
mann.

Owen, Iris M., and Margaret Sparrow, 1976. Con -
juring up Philip. New York: Harper and Row.

Planetary Council

Celeste Korsholm, a Sedona, Arizona, chan-
neler and metaphysical counselor, learned of
the Planetary Council one day in 1991. In an
out-of-body state, she met the twelve as¬
cended masters who compose the ruling body
of Earth’s solar system. Over the next few
years, they returned individually to channel
the histories of the planets and their futures.
Each planet, she learned, is like a university.
Each of us comes from somewhere else, from
a higher dimension of existence known as the
Source, and enters through star gates such as
Lyra, Orion, Sirius, and the Pleiades, “where
our higher frequencies of Light are gradually
decreased to prepare for life in the denser
third dimension,” in Korsholm’s words (Kor¬
sholm, 1991), on the way to the solar system.

The education starts at the Schools of Sat¬
urn, where the pilgrim gets a crash course in
each planet’s vibrations before spending a sepa¬
rate lifetime on at least one other planet before
making the decision whether to volunteer for
“postgraduate work on Earth” (Korsholm,

Power of Light 201

1995). On the chosen planet, one assumes the
physical form of its inhabitants. That means
that on Venus one becomes a winged hu¬
manoid that gives off light and color as it flies.
Merbeings live on Neptune, and on Uranus
one finds hairy primates with the features of
both human beings and the great apes. Mars
has two advanced insect races, one of ants, the
other of praying mantises. Jupiter houses
giant, intelligent reptilian forms. Each species
got its Light Intelligence from a group of trav¬
eling extraterrestrials called the Watchers who
monitor planets looking for species of excep¬
tional promise. As Earth was being developed,
the inhabitants of other planets were asked to
contribute representatives, thus fairies, mer¬
men and mermaids, Bigfoot/Sasquatch, in¬
sects, and dinosaurs. Explorers and refugees
from star wars live on the other planets. Evi¬
dence of the presence of neighboring extrater¬
restrials can be found in archaeological discov¬
eries and ancient myths. Each group tended to
concentrate its efforts in a particular region,
for example Martians in the Middle East, Ura-
nians in Mexico, and Plutonians in China.

Earth and other planets have undergone
much turbulence, much of it caused by the
tenth planet, Phoenix. “This huge planet’s
three thousand plus year orbit is at right an¬
gles to the plane of all the other planets’ or¬
bits,” Korsholm explains (Korsholm, 1995),
and when the other planets are on the same
side of the sun as it, its powerful magnetic
force field causes havoc on the surfaces of
those worlds, both destroying and creating.
The Planetary Council must always monitor
the location and effects of Phoenix. Its mem¬
bers also deal with the periodic arrival of
groups from other solar systems. Some are
highly evolved and benign, others less devel¬
oped and belligerent.

According to Korsholm, the members of
the Planetary Council are: Elorus, represent¬
ing the sun, coordinates the council’s work
with that of higher space intelligences and
Christ councils. Hermes (Mercury) is in
charge of communication through space.
Adonis (Venus) guides the evolution of love

and beauty. Enoch (Earth) oversees prophecy.
Croesus (Mars) is responsible for the coordi¬
nation of council activities with the dictates of
the Ascended Masters in the Brotherhood of
Light. Athena (the asteroid belt, formerly the
planet Maldek) defends truth and justice. Jove
(Jupiter) balances magnetic fields. Zoroaster
(Saturn) monitors order, structure, and des¬
tiny. Quetzalcoatal (Uranus) leads religious
and philosophical change. Merlin (Neptune)
directs scientific discovery. Lao-Tzu (Pluto)
offers objective, detached wisdom, and Apollo
(Phoenix) generates change. All of these indi¬
viduals figure in earthly mythology and (in
the case of Lao-Tzu, the founder of Taoism)
history.

See Also: Ascended Masters; Athena; Fairies encoun¬
tered; Sasquatch

Further Reading

Korsholm, Celeste, 1991. “Lao-Tzu, Planetary
Council Member from Pluto.” http://www.spir-
itweb.org/Spirit/pluto-celeste.html.

-, 1995. “Tales from the Planets.” http://spir-

itweb.org/Spirit/tales-planets-celeste.html.

Portia

Portia is best remembered as the extraterres¬
trial who in a July 18, 1952, channeling with
George W. Van Tassel introduced Ashtar, the
most ubiquitous and beloved of New Age be¬
ings. The psychic message was, “Approaching
your solar system is a ventla [spaceship] with
our chief aboard, commander of the station
Schare in charge of the first four sectors. . . .
We are waiting here at 72,000 miles above
you to welcome our chief, who will be enter¬
ing this solar system for the first time” (Van
Tassel, 1952). The chief was Ashtar.

See Also: Ashtar; Channeling; Van Tassel, George W.

Further Reading

Van Tassel, George W., 1952. I Rode a Flying Saucer!
The Mystery of the Flying Saucers Revealed. Los
Angeles: New Age Publishing Company.

Power of Light (POL)

One day in 1967, a deeply unhappy Swedish
man, Bjorn Ortenheim, vowed to commit sui-

202 Prince Neosom

Landscape with volcanic craters, Haleakala Mountains, Maui, Hawaii National Park. Bjorn Ortenheim was informed by
Power of Light that Lemurian ruins with still powerful energies and vibrations could be found on or near the ocean around
Maui. (Library of Congress)

cide. Prior to committing the act, however, he
lapsed into a deep, almost comalike sleep.
When he awoke, he was mysteriously trans¬
formed, full of scientific ambitions and bold
ideas. He soon became aware that otherworldly
entities were instructing him during his sleep.
They were particularly interested in nonpollut¬
ing technology and in other inventions that
would elevate human consciousness. In 1981,
the leader of the group, Power of Light (Orten¬
heim soon began thinking of him as POL), ap¬
peared to him in waking consciousness.

Ortenheim found himself ever more at¬
tracted to the Hawaiian island of Maui. POL
informed him that Lemurian ruins with still
powerful energies and vibrations could be
found on or near the ocean. In fact, the capi¬
tal city of Lemuria, Denerali, lay under the
water in the bay outside Maui. POL said a
large crystal from that lost continent existed

there. Ortenheim should use its energies, em¬
ploying his own technological innovations to
enhance them, to raise human consciousness.

He soon moved to Maui to pursue his
work, always under POLs guidance. Accord¬
ing to Ortenheim, POL is not a person but a
near-god who is among God’s highest ser¬
vants. POL is, he says, “in charge of the ulti¬
mate energy and source of life in our universe,
the Universal Magnetic Field, UMF” (Mont¬
gomery, 1985).

Further Reading

Montgomery, Ruth, 1985. Aliens among Us. New
York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

Prince Neosom

Prince Neosom was Lee Childers, a Detroit
baker who, in 1958, reinvented himself as a

Psychoterrestrials 203

member of the royal family of the planet
Tythan, eight and a half light years from
Earth. Neosom said he had replaced the body
of a stillborn child (Childers). He also claimed
that he could travel instantaneously through
space simply by closing his eyes and wishing
himself to other planets. Three times, he said,
the men in black had killed him, and three
times a rejuvenation machine had brought
him back to life.

At the peak of his brief moment in the
spotlight, Neosom/Childers was brought to
New York City to lecture. In December 1958,
he appeared on Long John Nebel’s popular
WOR radio show, which catered to the eccen¬
tric and the esoteric, but he managed to get
thrown off the air before his allotted time was
up; his stories were too outlandish even for
the famously tolerant Nebel. By this time,
Childers had left his wife and five children
and taken up with Beth Docker, soon re¬
named Princess Negonna, whom he soon
married and honeymooned with on Tythan.

Childers’s career on saucerdom’s fringes
continued until the early 1960s.

Further Reading

Barker, Gray, 1959. “Chasing the Flying Saucers.”
Flying Saucers (May): 19-43.

Mann, Michael G., 1960. “Prince or Eng, He Isn’t a
Spaceman!” Saucer News 7, 1 (March): 5-7.

Mapes. D. O., 1959. Prince Neosom, Planet: Tyton
[sic]. Buffalo, NY: self-published.

Psychoterrestrials

New Age psychologist Michael Grosso uses
the term “psychoterrestrials” to describe a
range of anomalous and paranormal entities,
including UFO beings, Marian apparitions,
and men in black. He believes that such enti¬
ties, though “mythic constructs,” are able to
assume a quasi-physical reality because of the
deep resonance they have in humanity’s col¬
lective psyche. Another name for psychoter¬
restrials is psychic projections.

Grosso believes that UFOs and other exotic
phenomena are “forces of rebirth” that the

An artist’s impression of a gray alien, based on witness
descriptions, an example of a psychoterrestrial being
(Debbie Lee/Fortean Picture Library)

“ultradimensional mind” has conjured up to
transform mass consciousness in order to save
the human race for otherwise certain self-
destruction. “Given the timeless, spaceless na¬
ture of ESP and PK [psychokinesis], perhaps
some (or all) human minds form a system—a
parallel universe of mind, a distinct entity
with its own properties. ... It would be a
mind with properties distinct from compo¬
nent minds, on the assumption that the whole
is greater than the sum of its parts. . . . Per¬
haps this is the entity that holds the secret to
the UFO mystery” (Grosso, 1991).

In his view, psychoterrestrial phenomena
are so powerful that, for example, in their
UFO manifestation they are even able to
show up on radar. Grosso drew inspiration in
his speculations from the celebrated Swiss
psychologist and philosopher C. G. Jung. In
his own reflection on the UFO phenomenon,
however, Jung, who thought UFOs were
probably of extraterrestrial origin, rejected the

Aliens, or psychoterrestrials, capture a man played by James Earl Jones in The UFO Incident, an NBC TV movie, 1975.
(Photofest)

notion of “materialized psychisms” as impossi¬
ble, and, in particular, he dismissed the no¬
tion that materialized psychisms, even if they
could be proved to exist, could be detected by
instruments such as radar.

See Also: Imaginal beings; Marian apparitions; Men
in black

Further Reading

Grosso, Michael, 1985. The Final Choice: Playing
the Survival Game. Walpole, NH: Stillpoint
Publishing.

-, 1992. Frontiers of the Sold: Exploring Psychic

Evohition. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books.

-, 1989. “UFOs and the Myth of the New

Age.” In Dennis Stillings, ed. Cyberbiological
Studies of the Imaginal Component in the UFO
Contact Experience, 81-98. St. Paul, MN: Arches
Project.

-, 1991. “The Ultradimensional Mind.”

Strange Magazine 7 (April): 10-13.

Jung, C. G., 1959. Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of
Things Seen in the Skies. New York: Harcourt,
Brace and Company.

Puddy’s abduction

An incident from Australia in the early
1970s may or may not shed light on the
UFO abduction phenomenon. Maureen
Puddy’s experiences, some contend, indicate
that persons who believe that aliens have kid¬
napped them may instead be suffering vivid
hallucinations, perhaps in altered states of
consciousness.

On the evening of July 3, 1972, on her way
home from seeing her hospitalized son, this
thirty-seven-year-old Victoria woman was
alarmed to see a glowing blue UFO pacing
her car at a distance of no more than a hun¬
dred feet. Just as suddenly as it appeared, it
was gone. One night later that month, she
began hearing a mental voice repeatedly
speaking her name. The next evening, July 25,
at the same place she had seen it before, the
UFO showed up. Her car engine abruptly

Puddy’s abduction 205

ceased functioning, and everything became
eerily silent. A mechanical voice speaking “too
perfect” English told her, “All your tests will
be negative.” It went on, “Tell the media. Do
not panic. We mean no harm” (Magee, 1972,
1978). At the UFO’s departure the car’s en¬
gine resumed operation.

She next heard the voice in February, when it
instructed her to return to the “meeting place.”
By this time she had met with two prominent
ufologists, Judith Magee and Paul Norman, so
she called them and asked them to meet her at
the designated location. As Puddy waited in her
parked car for the two to arrive, a man with
long, blond hair, wearing a uniform that looked
like a ski suit, briefly appeared next to her be¬
fore he vanished. As soon as they pulled up,
Magee and Norman joined her inside her vehi¬
cle. Puddy shouted that the same strange man
was beckoning to her, but the investigators saw
nothing. She then seemed to faint, though her
mouth kept moving. She spoke of being in a
round room and watching as a mushroom¬
shaped device rose from the middle of the floor.
It was covered with markings reminiscent of hi¬
eroglyphics. Near it stood the blond-haired fig¬
ure she had seen minutes before. She said the
man was telling her to describe what she was
seeing. All the while Puddy was growing ever

more frightened, until finally she broke into
tears. At that moment she regained full con¬
sciousness but remembered nothing.

She claimed one other subsequent en¬
counter with the stranger, whom she saw
standing in the road about a week later.

Australian ufologist Keith Basterfield
would write, “All who interviewed Maureen
Puddy thought her to be a normal, healthy in¬
dividual. The entire series of events puzzled
her, and she got nothing but ridicule from
persons for reporting the episodes” (Baster¬
field, 1992). Her story bore some resemblance
to abduction accounts, but there are also some
differences, notably the absence of the med¬
ical examination which figures in most such
experiences. Still, skeptics see it as evidence
that what witnesses believe to be objective ex¬
periences may in fact be subjective in nature.

See Also: Abductions by UFOs

Further Reading

Basterfield, Keith, 1992. “Present at the Abduction.”
International UFO Reporter 17, 3 (May/June):
13-14, 23.

Magee, Judith, 1972. “UFO over the Mooraduc
Road.” Flying Saucer Review 18, 6 (November/
December): 3-5.

-, 1978. “Maureen Puddy’s Third Encounter.”

Flying Saucer Review 24, 3 (November 1978):
12-13, 15.

R. D.

In both abduction reports and contactee sto¬
ries, claimants sometimes report seeing
human beings onboard a UFO and in the
company of aliens. One such incident is said
to have occurred on June 5, 1964, in Ar¬
gentina. At 4 A.M., a doctor and his wife were
driving a few miles from the airport at Pajas
Blancas, in Cordoba province, when their en¬
gine failed. A huge, extraordinary-looking
craft landed on the highway in front of them.
For the next twenty minutes the couple stared
in puzzlement and unease at the UFO. Then,
according to a press account, a man walked
out of it and spoke to them in Spanish, “Don’t
be afraid. I am a terrestrial. My name is R.
D.” Apparently the man gave his full name,
but published accounts give only his initials.
He went on, “Tell mankind about it, in your
own fashion” (Creighton, 1974).

The man walked slowly back toward the
UFO and was joined by two gray-clad beings
who had suddenly appeared. They boarded
the ship, and it flew rapidly away, a violet-col¬
ored trail in its wake.

See Also: Abductions by UFOs; Contactees

Further Reading

Creighton, Gordon, 1974. “The Humanoids in
Latin America.” In Charles Bowen, ed. The Hu -
manoids, 84-129. London: Futura Publications.

Ra channeled through Carla Rueckert. Ra was
not an individual but a group entity, part of
the “Confederation of Planets in the Service
of the Infinite Creator” (Rueckert and Elkins,
1977). The goal, Ra said, was to “give instruc¬
tions to those of planet Earth who would seek
the instructions for how to produce within
themselves the vibration that is more harmo¬
nious with the original thought.”

Further Reading

Rueckert, Carla, and Don Elkins, 1977. Secrets of the
UFOs. Louisville, KY: L/L Research.

Rainbow City

Rainbow City was the ancestral, earthly home
of the human race, according to a mystically
inclined couple, W. C. and Gladys Hefferlin.
It was located in Antarctica before the Earth
tipped on its side, and the continent became
the uninhabitable place as it is known today.

The Hefferlins surfaced in 1946, in short
pieces published in Ray Palmer’s Amazing Sto -
ries, then publishing a series of stories detail¬
ing the Shaver mystery, a supposedly true ac¬
count of Richard Shaver’s adventures with
good and evil races living in caverns under the
earth. After W. C. Hefferlin made a passing
reference to “Rainbow City,” Palmer ap-

207

208 Rainbow City

pended a statement describing it as “the head¬
quarters, a deserted city of the Gods (or the
Elder Race) under the ice of the [South] Pole”
(Kafton-Minkel, 1989). Hefferlin claimed to
have access to advanced weapons and devices
left over from Rainbow City, but his asser¬
tions about the science behind them were so
full of elementary technical errors that reader
ridicule encouraged Palmer to cease publish¬
ing Hefferlin’s writings.

He and his wife reappeared, however, in
1947 and 1948, in publications of the Cali¬
fornia-based Borderland Sciences Research
Associates. In a series of articles, they re¬
counted their association with a mysterious
man named Emery, whom they first met in
1927. Over time they developed a system of
telepathic communication with him, sending
thoughts back and forth from their Indiana
home to his in New York City. Emery began
to travel widely, dropping out of sight without
explanation, then reappearing. Just before the
onset of World War II, he informed them that
he had met a Tibetan master who lived in a
hidden valley in that nation. Soon he was
working under orders from the Masters of
Human Destiny, otherwise known as the An¬
cient Three.

Recognizing W. C. Hefferlin as a reincar¬
nated engineer who had worked for the an¬
cients long ago, the Three asked him for help
in constructing a fleet of three hundred-fifty
circle-winged aircraft. After the craft were
completed, they searched Antarctica for the
ruins of Rainbow City, where the Three had
lived during their first earthly incarnation.
Emery himself participated in the search,
which ended on Thanksgiving Day 1942
when he found Rainbow City.

Over time, Emery revealed the secrets of the
Three to the Hefferlins. Once, they said, the
human race ruled hundreds of galaxies. Unfor¬
tunately, the spacefarers eventually encountered
the Snake People, and soon deadly conflict
spread through the cosmos. After centuries of
stalemate, the tide turned in the Snake People’s
favor. The Snake People pursued the humans
through space, stranding some on obscure,

backwater planets. The rest made it to the
planet now known as Mars, where the last of
the Human Empire lived in relative comfort
for a long time. Then the planet began to die,
its oxygen and water evaporating and the tem¬
perature growing ever colder.

Thus the humans found their way to the
third planet in the solar system. They settled
in what is now Antarctica, a pleasant, temper¬
ate place. They built seven cities, each with its
own color (Red City, Green City, Blue City,
and so on). The greatest of all was Rainbow
City, constructed from many colors of a very
hard plastic. Under the wise leadership of the
son and daughter of the Great Ruler (still on
Mars) and the daughters fiance (later to be
called the Ancient Three), the colony thrived,
and a golden age ensued, ending when the
Snake People, having discovered where the
humans were hiding, mounted a surprise at¬
tack. In the fierce battles that followed, the
Earth was knocked on its side, turning
Antarctica into a wasteland. The humans were
driven to other, now warmer continents.
Their technology destroyed, they were re¬
duced to a primitive state and gradually lost
all memory of their former elevated state.

When they rediscovered it, Emery and his
associates found the city surrounded by ten
thousand feet of ice, thus concealing the re¬
mains from previous explorers. Hot springs
beneath the city kept it warm, and the search
party went through all six levels. Inside the
city, plants and trees of all kinds still grew,
along with huge butterflies. All kinds of evi¬
dence of the ancients’ presence survived, in¬
cluding clothes (which suggested they were
eight feet tall) and advanced technology. The
technology included a teleportation device
and a vast subway system. The trains were
linked to hollow caverns all over the earth.
Emery traveled to some of them and found
yet more wonders from the ancients.

The Ancient Three sought to restore the
human race’s former glories. According to the
Hefferlins, the world’s nonwhite races had al¬
ready accepted their leadership, which was
headquartered in seven temples in Africa,

Ramtha 209

Asia, and South America. The “thought ma¬
chines” inside these temples broadcast vibra¬
tions to those who were receptive to them.
The principal message was that other nations
must free themselves of European domina¬
tion, though the Ancient Three had opposed
the Japanese imperial designs that helped
spark World War II. Once the Ancient Three
had realized their vision and taken benevolent
control of the Earth, there would be no more
slavery, colonialism, or excessive taxation, and
all races would be equal.

Though the Elefferlins soon faded into ob¬
scurity without ever providing proof of Rain¬
bow City (or even of their enigmatic friend
Emery, for that matter), the notion of Rain¬
bow City figured in Robert Dickhoff’s
Agharta: The Subterranean World (1951) and
Michael X. Barton’s Rainbow City and the
Inner Earth People (I960).

Further Reading

Kafton-Minkel, Walter, 1989. Subterranean Worlds:
100,000 Years of Dragons, Dwarfs, the Dead, Lost
Races and UFOs from inside the Earth. Port
Townsend, WA: Loompanics Unlimited.

X, Michael [pseud, of Michael X. Barton], 1960.
Rainbow City and the Inner Earth People. Los An¬
geles: Futura.

Ramtha

Ramtha, perhaps the leading channeled entity
of the 1980s, first appeared in a Tacoma,
Washington, living room to announce, “I am
Ramtha, the Enlightened One, and I have
come to help you over the ditch”—by which,
it turned out, he meant the “ditch of limita¬
tion” (Knight, 1987). J. Z. Knight (born Ju¬
dith Darlene Hampton) and her husband had
been experimenting with pyramids, which ac¬
cording to a 1970s New Age belief had myste¬
rious powers. For a short time, Knight be¬
lieved that Ramtha was a demonic entity.
Soon, however, a spiritualist friend helped her
understand the nature of her experience, and
she gave her guidance in how to channel
Ramtha. On December 17, 1978, she gave
the first public channeling of Ramtha.

Ramtha claimed to be 35,000 years old,
born on the lost continent of Lemuria.
Lemuria, in the Pacific, was destroyed in an ir¬
responsible experiment its scientists con¬
ducted. Some residents, including Ramtha’s
family, escaped to southern Atlantis (the ex¬
periment that devastated Lemuria also de¬
stroyed much of north Atlantis). There they
lived, experiencing poverty and discrimina¬
tion in the slums of a city called Onai. When
he grew into adulthood, Ramtha led a revolt,
which overthrew the existing order in At¬
lantis. As he was recovering from wounds, he
became interested in meditation and spent
much time reflecting on metaphysical ques¬
tions. He also learned to alter his body so that
its vibrations changed, allowing him to enter
the light realm. On the occasion of his physi¬
cal death, he ascended permanently to that
realm. Just before that happened, though, he
demonstrated his new paranormal powers in
India, where he is still remembered and
revered as the incarnate deity Rama.

In the early 1980s, Knight went public
with Ramtha. She traveled throughout the
United States giving two-day workshops
known as “Ramtha Dialogues.” Along the
way, she attracted the attention of New Age-
oriented celebrities such as Shirley MacLaine,
Richard Chamberlain, Mike Farrell, and Shel¬
ley Fabres, who enthusiastically supported her
work. MacLaine discussed Ramtha in her
best-selling Dancing in the Light (1985).
Knight put together a nonprofit corporation
that evolved into the non-tax-exempt Sover¬
eignty, Inc.

By this time, Knight had amassed so much
money that a growing legion of critics ques¬
tioned her sincerity. She now lived on a luxu¬
rious horse-breeding ranch in Yelm, Washing¬
ton, the focus of a large following of pilgrims
who had moved to the Northwest from
homes all over the nation and the world.
Some, seeking a safe haven from the cata¬
clysmic Earth changes that Ramtha said were
about to occur, had left families to do so. Ses¬
sions with Ramtha were expensive. Beyond
that, critics charged, Ramtha had become, in

210 Ramu

effect, Knight’s business partner; would-be in¬
vestors in Knight’s Arabian horses would seek
the master’s advice. After some complained
they had purchased mediocre horses after
heeding Ramtha’s advice, authorities investi¬
gated, and Knight ended up reimbursing un¬
happy buyers, though no charges were filed.
Critics also asserted that the once gregarious,
friendly Ramtha had grown ever more author¬
itarian and demanding. Even some sympa¬
thetic to channeling beliefs speculated that
“whatever energy came through J. Z. Knight
has either shifted, departed, or been replaced
by a less benign entity” (Klimo, 1987).

In 1988, Knight formed Ramtha’s School of
Enlightenment, which claims some three thou¬
sand students from twenty-three countries. In
1995, a small scandal erupted when press ac¬
counts exposed the Federal Aviation Adminis¬
tration’s payment of $1.4 million for sensitiv¬
ity-training classes overseen by a Ramtha
disciple. Over the past decade or so, according
to one knowledgeable observer, “the prophecies
of Knight and Ramtha seem to have moved
closer to those of right-wing survivalists and
anti-Semites, who foresee a world held in the
sinister group of international bankers as part
of a New World Order” (Brown, 1997).

Knowledgeable observers, such as religious-
studies scholar J. Gordon Melton, say that
much of Ramtha’s teaching comes from the
Gnostic tradition, which holds that God ex¬
ists within each of us and is to be found there
through contemplation and self-mastery.

Further Reading

Brown, Michael F., 1997. The Channeling Zone:
American Spirituality in an Anxious Age. Cam¬
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Carroll, Robert Todd, n.d. “The Skeptic’s Dictio¬
nary: Ramtha aka J. Z. Knight.” http://skepdic.
com/channel.html.

Kauki, Christopher Vincent, 1997. “Ramtha in the
Petri Dish: The Mixing of Science and Faith in
Yelm.” Syzygy 6, 1 (Winter/Spring): 139-142.

Klimo, Jon, 1987. Channeling: Investigations on Re -
ceiving Information from Paranormal Sources. Los
Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher.

Knight, J. Z., 1987. A State of Mind. New York:
Warner Books.

MacLaine, Shirley, 1985. Dancing in the Light. New
York: Bantam Books.

Melton, J. Gordon, 1998. Finding Enlightenment:
Ramtha’s School of Ancient Wisdom. Hillsboro,
OR: Beyond Words Publishing.

Stearn, Jess, 1984. Sold Mates. New York: Bantam
Books.

Weinberg, Steven L„ ed., 1986. Ramtha. Eastsound,
WA: Sovereignty.

-, ed., 1988. Ramtha: An Introduction. East-

bound, WA: Sovereignty.

Ramu

Ramu is the name George Adamski gave to a
visitor from Saturn. With Ramu and others,
Adamski flew around the moon one memo¬
rable night in 1954. He cautioned, however,
that Ramu, like the other Space Brothers, has
“an entirely different concept of names as we
use them” (Adamski, 1955). Thus, Ramu was
not really the spaceman’s name. Adamski de¬
scribes Ramu as slightly over six feet, with
ruddy complexion and dark brown eyes and
wavy black hair.

A different Ramu from Saturn figures in a
story that farmer Velma Thayer told the
Cincinnati Enquirer in August 1955. This
Ramu landed in a flying saucer at her Lake
Geneva, Wisconsin, farm on October 15,
1928, along with other “little fellows.” All
were blond-haired and from four feet six
inches to five feet three inches in height. They
stayed for ten days (it is not clear whether at
Thayer’s residence or in their saucer). Ramu
told Thayer that they were from Saturn and
had come with peaceful intentions. U.S. gov¬
ernment authorities came to the farm and
placed a guard around the ship. At one point,
however, the guard fell asleep, and the saucer
escaped. Thayer said she had had occasional
contacts since with Ramu and his crew.

Nonetheless, in an earlier account—one
published in a contactee-oriented magazine
before Adamski’s Ramu became known—
Thayer did not mention a Ramu in connec¬
tion with the alleged experience, suggesting
that the inclusion of the name was a later em¬
bellishment. This earlier version says nothing

Renata 211

about communication or interaction with the
crew. When the saucer landed, according to
her, “Seven small people emerged and ran into
the woods,” never to be seen again (“Space
Ship,” 1954). In their absence, she examined
the ship inside and out. Rather than escaping,
the craft was taken to the General Electric lab¬
oratory, which subsequently informed her
that it was made up of materials that “defi¬
nitely did not belong to this earth.” According
to Thayer, a dozen landings of ships with sim¬
ilar crews took place in Wisconsin and Illinois
between 1919 and 1930.

See Also: Adamski, George; Contactees

Further Reading

Bartholomew, Robert E., and George S. Howard,
1998. UFOs and Alien Contact: Two Centuries of
Mystery. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

“Space Ship Lands in Celery Field,” 1954. Interplan -
etary News Digest (March): 22.

Raphael

Raphael is responsible for the “Starseed trans¬
missions,” said to come from a parallel dimen¬
sion through channeler Ken Carey. Carey, a
Missouri farmer, had no previous channeling
experience before Raphael came through one
day in 1979. He says the messages first arrived
via “waves or pulsations” that translated sym¬
bols into their verbal correlates. “Often,” he
writes, “it was the case that the only human
conceptual system with approximating termi¬
nology was religious. Hence, the occasional
use of ‘Christian’ words and phrases” (Carey,
1982). Eventually, the communications oc¬
curred more straightforwardly in English.

Raphael says he exists only when he is in¬
teracting with Carey or with whomever he is
communicating through Carey. When he is
not active, he merges “back into the Being be¬
hind all being,” awaiting his next mission. On
one occasion, however, he claimed to be the
intelligence represented by Christ.

See Also: Channeling

Further Reading

Carey, Ken, 1982. The Starseed Transmissions: An Ex -
traterrestrial Report. Kansas City, MO: UNI¬
SUN.

Raydia

After a 1979 UFO sighting, Lyssa Royal
found herself more and more fascinated with
paranormal subjects. Her interests led her, in
1984, to Darryl Anka, who channeled Bashar.
During the period of her association with
Anka, she had a vivid dream in which an en¬
tity appeared to inform her that soon she her¬
self would be channeling. She was led to a
channeling class in Los Angeles. By 1985, a
number of entities were making their presence
known to her. One was Raydia, who stayed
with Royal for three years.

Royal went on to found the Association of
Love and Light, channeling Raydia as well as
some others. Raydia was a “heart-centered”
female entity, “a collective consciousness”
with “a strong affdiation with the star Arc-
turus.” She last communicated in 1988,
telling persons who were sitting in on a chan¬
neling session, “You will never see me in this
form again.” Royal says that Raydia “inte¬
grated herself” into an entity Royal would
subsequently channel, Germane (“Behind the
Veil,” 1998).

Further Reading

“Behind the Veil: A Look at the Phenomenon of
Channeling,” 1998. http://www.royalpriest.com/
channel.htm.

Melton, J. Gordon, 1996. Encyclopedia of Ameri -
can Religions. Fifth edition. Detroit, MI: Gale
Research.

Renata

Renata channels through Scott Amun. On
April 15, 1999, she (gender is presumed since
the entity does not specify its sex) came
through for the first time to discuss various
issues.

Renata says that on her planet, Osyllium,
people look and act much like humans; yet,
paradoxically, Osyllium’s history is richer and
more diverse than Earth’s. Perhaps one reason
is that Osyllium people change their language
every four or five years. They do this by ad¬
justing their brain frequencies, and the pur¬
pose is to accelerate change and encourage

212 Reptoid child

new insight. Great changes are about to occur
on Earth through the electrical energy that
emanates from the north pole. Human beings
soon will notice a “special effect” in the
northern lights—a message from Renatas
people. Humans will also sense a changing
situation in their dreams, which will help pre¬
pare them for their “opening into higher elec¬
trical frequencies.”

Further Reading

Amun, Scott, 1999. “Morning Dawns on the
Human Race.” http://www.scottamun.com/
write/Aprill598write.htm.

Reptoid child

In a story represented as true by Mexican ufol¬
ogist Luis Ramirez Reyes, a woman is said to
have given birth to a hideous alien baby after a
missing-time, presumed abduction experi¬
ence. Ramirez claims that the birth took place
in September 1993 but “due to its very nature
has been kept under wraps.”

The unnamed woman, a cosmetics sales¬
person, was on her usual route, which took
her between Mexico City and Poza Rica, Ver¬
acruz, one day in early 1993. As she passed
the Teotihuacan pyramids, she saw what she
thought was a UFO in the clear sky. Suddenly,
she found herself in Poza Rica. Though her
wristwatch told her it was 11 A.M., the actual
time was 2 P.M. She had no idea how she had
traveled the 185 miles to the city.

In the weeks to come, she experienced
weakness and nausea. When a doctor exam¬
ined her, he pronounced her pregnant. She
protested that this was impossible; she was a
virgin. Nonetheless, seven months later, she
gave birth to a hideous creature described as
having “double-membraned eyes, thick frog¬
like lips, joined fingers and hard, shell-feature
on its skin which [was] similar to a tortoise’s
shell.” At first the doctors and nurses pan¬
icked. The clinic director finally managed to
calm them. He ordered them to keep the mat¬
ter strictly confidential.

The creature was kept in an incubator for
three weeks, fed on a diet of herbs. It recoiled

from ordinary light but was comfortable in
infrared light. Scales began to grow along its
spine. An expert “who has requested
anonymity” examined photographs of the
creature, which he deduced belonged to a
“saurian” species.

The mother is raising the creature in seclu¬
sion. It is an “amphibian reptile” said to be
“horrible to behold.”

Further Reading

Corrales, Scott, 2000. “Alien Shock: The Encounter
Phenomenon Overseas.” Ohio UFO Notebook 2 1:
22-26.

Reptoids

Beings sometimes referred to as “reptoids” or
“reptilians” figure in a number of abduction
and contact reports. According to one source,
three different varieties exist: “the Reptoid
(reptilian-humanoid crossbreeds), the various
reptilian-gray crossbreed types, and the hierar¬
chical reptilian overlords called the Draco
(winged reptilian types)” (“Reptilian ‘Aliens,’”
n.d.). Draco is a constellation from which,
some believe, the reptoids come.

A close encounter of the third kind involv¬
ing reptoids (though before the concept had
become popular) happened on November 17,
1967, when thirteen-year-old David Seewaldt
of Calgary, Alberta, while crossing a vacant
lot, heard a high-pitched sound. When he
looked for its source, he saw a house-sized
UFO landing. It shot a beam of light at him,
putting him into a trancelike state as he was
levitated into the craft. There two hideous-
looking entities with brown crocodile skin
took off Seewaldt’s clothes and led him into a
room where he was examined and given a
shot. He was then beamed back to the field.
By the time he got home, all conscious mem¬
ory of the encounter had passed. It returned
five months later in a vivid dream. A year
later, investigators, including a University of
Alberta psychologist, interviewed the youth.

John S. Carpenter, a Missouri-based social
worker and abduction researcher, reports cases

An artist’s rendition
Schaffner/Fortean Pi

214 Reptoids

of “repulsive and insensitive” reptilian aliens.
“What is fascinating,” he writes, “is that per¬
sons who had never heard of these lizard-types
are reporting strikingly similar details in re¬
gards [sic] to their anatomy, manner, and be¬
havior. In every case of mine the reptilian
forces a rape upon the subject with no expla¬
nation or apparent reason” (Carpenter, 1994).
Another researcher, Karla Turner, has written
of similar incidents, including one in which
an abductee “recalled” being on a table sur¬
rounded by humanoid aliens. She said, “A
reptile-looking creature was getting on top of
me, I guess to rape me,” just before she lapsed
into unconsciousness (Turner, 1994).

Besides such experiential claims, reptoid/
reptilian aliens have given rise to a new
mythology that fuses conspiracy theories, bib¬
lical literalism, hollow earth, and other ideas.
Among the most bizarre is the assertion by a
leader of Britain’s Green Party, David Icke,
who holds that the Royal Family are shape-
shifting reptilians who conduct bloody rituals
on hapless human victims, including children.
At least one writer reports that former Presi¬
dent George Bush is a reptilian. Others assert
that reptoids live in vast caverns underground,
working in collaboration with evil forces in
U.S. military and intelligence communities.
Others say that the reptilians have been slan¬
dered, that—except for their (to the human
eye) unsettling appearance—they are gentle,
decent, and well intentioned.

One who speaks well of reptilians is jazz
singer Pamela Stonebrooke, who has spoken
openly of a sexual relationship with one. She
has “great respect” for him and a “profound
connection with this being.” Under hypnosis,
she was regressed to an earlier life hundreds of
thousands of years ago to find herself a mem¬
ber of a band of “reptilian warriors facing a
catastrophic event in which we perished
together. ... I believe that on one level, I may
be meeting these entities again, perhaps fellow
warriors from the past warning us of an im¬
pending, self-inflicted doom” (“The Reptil¬
ians,” n.d.). Carpenter has written of reptoid
witnesses known to him, “One . . . sheepishly

admits to having an incredible orgasm while
being totally repulsed by the intruder’s
grotesque appearance. Within two months a
second female from the same town reported
independently the same type of Reptilian in¬
vader, with the same surprising and embarrass¬
ing orgasmic response!” (Carpenter, 1993).

Some observers believe that the reptilians
are satanic entities related to the serpent who
led Adam and Eve astray. They maintain that
hundreds of thousands of these creatures—as
many as one hundred fifty-thousand in New
York alone—live in underground bases, feast¬
ing on children whom they lure into their
lairs. According to some, however, the reptil¬
ians are vegetarians.

John Rhodes writes that the reptilians
travel from their home region—Alpha Draco-
nis—in mother ships with most of the occu¬
pants in a state of suspended animation for
the bulk of the voyage. As they pass planets,
some of the functioning crew fly off in scout
ships to study the new worlds and establish
subterranean bases thereon. Where Earth is
concerned, according to Rhodes, the reptil¬
ians hatch their plots from these bases, “estab¬
lishing a network of human-reptilian cross¬
bred infiltrates [sic] within various levels of
the surface culture’s military industrial com¬
plexes, government bodies, UFO/paranormal
groups, religious, and fraternal (priest) orders,
etc. These crossbreeds, some unaware of their
reptilian genetic ‘mind-control’ instructions,
act out their subversive roles as ‘reptilian
agents,’ setting the stage for an [sic] reptilian
led ET invasion” (Rhodes, n.d.).

See Also: Abductions by UFOs; Close encounters of
the third kind; Hollow earth; Hybrid beings;
King Leo; Reptoid child; Volmo

Further Reading

Allan, W. K., 1975. “Crocodile-Skinned Entities at
Calgary.” Flying Saucer Revieiv 20, 6 (April):
25-26.

Carpenter, John S., 1993. “Abduction Notes: Reptil¬
ians and Other Unmentionables.” MUFON
UFO Journals 00 (April): 10—11.

-, 1994. “Other Types of Aliens: Patterns

Emerging.” In Andrea Pritchard, David E.
Pritchard, John E. Mack, Pam Kasey, and Clau¬
dia Yapp, eds. Alien Discussions: Proceedings of the

215

A painting of Madame Helene Blavatsky, who proposed the theory of five “root races, ” with the symbol of the Theosophical
Society above her head (Fortean Picture Library)

216 Root Races

Abduction Study Conference, 91-95. Cambridge,
MA: North Cambridge Press.

Coleman, Loren, 1988. “Other Lizard People Revis¬
ited.” Strange Magazine 3: 34.

D’Light, Joy, and Elliemiser, 1999. “The Reptilians
and King Leo.” http://www.greatdreams.com/
reptlan/repleo.htm.

McClure, Kevin, 1999. “Dark Ages.” Fortean Times
129 (December): 28-32.

“Reptilian ‘Aliens’: What Do They Look Like?,” n.d.
http: //www. rep toids. com/phydes .htm.

“Reptiles/Serpents/Lizards in History/Mythology/
Religion,” n.d. http://www.channell.com/users/
com/cci / reptiles.htm.

Rhodes, John, n.d. “O.R.I.G.I.N.S.” http://www.
reptoids.com/origins/htm.

Turner, Karla, 1994. Taken: Inside the Alien-Human
Abduction Agenda. Roland, AR: Kelt Works.

Root Races

In the alternative reality proposed in the influ¬
ential nineteenth-century Theosophical writ¬
ings of Helene Petrovna Blavatsky, the world
has seen five “root races,” each with its own
seven “sub-races,” and these latter with their
own “branch races.” Blavatsky wrote that two
more root races will come before the human
race finishes its evolution.

The First Root Race, of “fire mist” folk,
lived near the north pole in the Imperishable
Sacred Land. They were invisible. The Second
Root Race were astral beings on their way to
becoming material and visible. Also living in
the polar region, they occupied a more or less
material continent known as Hyperborea,
where they learned how to reproduce sexually.
The Third Root Race were apelike in appear¬

ance with characteristics of both sexes; some
had four arms, and some had an eye in the
back of their heads. These beings lived on the
now-lost Pacific continent of Lemuria. By the
time the Fourth Root Race, dwelling on At¬
lantis, appeared on Earth, the present human
form had developed. Humans represent the
Fifth Root Race. In the relatively near future,
the Sixth Root Race will replace humans.
After the Seventh Root Race has risen and
fallen, a new cycle of civilizations will begin
on the planet Mercury.

Blavatsky claimed as her source for these
revelations an “archaic Manuscript—a collec¬
tion of palm leaves made impermeable to
water, fire, and air, by some specific unknown
process. . . . On the first page is an immacu¬
late white disk within a dull black ground. On
the following page, the same disk, but with a
central point” (Blavatsky, 1889). These “Stan¬
zas of Dzyan” recorded the hidden history of
the cosmos and all of its inhabitants, includ¬
ing the human race. Other scholars, however,
contend that Blavatsky drew on contempo¬
rary scientific and occult literature and embel¬
lished it considerably, though not quite be¬
yond recognition.

See Also: Atlantis; Lemuria

Further Reading

Blavatsky, H. P., 1889. The Secret Doctrine, London:
Theosophical Publishing Company.

De Camp, L. Sprague, 1970. Lost Continents: The At -
lands Theme in History, Science, and Literattire.
New York: Dover Publications.

Meade, Marion, 1980. Madame Blavatsky: The
Woman behind the Myth. New York: G. P. Put¬
nam’s Sons.

Saint Michael

Saint Michael the Archangel is perhaps best
known from the traditional Georgia Sea Is¬
lands spiritual “Michael, Row the Boat
Ashore,” but even in contemporary time
some people claim to have experienced his
presence. One is a Southern California
woman, Melissa MacLeod, a practicing
Roman Catholic. In the 1980s, she experi¬
enced terrifying nocturnal visitations in
which a tall, black-hooded figure stared at her
menacingly from beside her bed. She is con¬
vinced, according to ufologist Ann Druffel,
that her intense belief in Michael saved her
from this demonic manifestation.

Fascinated by MacLeod’s experiences, a
friend, writer and parapsychologist Stephen
A. Schwartz, engaged in three months’ intense
meditation to see if he could visualize
Michael. After three months, a point of light
suddenly shone in his room. Within it, the
form of a luminous entity, human in shape
but larger, emerged into view. “He had a de¬
meanor of absolute implacability,” Schwartz
recalled (Druffel, 1998). He was convinced he
had seen the archangel.

Further Reading

Druffel, Ann, 1998. How to Defend Yourself
against Alien Abduction. New York: Three
Rivers Press.

Sananda

Sananda, a popular channeling entity, is a pow¬
erful being who is Ashtar’s superior in the space
mission to redeem Earth. Sananda, known as
Jesus in an earlier, earthly incarnation, is per¬
haps best known, however, as the principal
contact of Dorothy Martin (Sister Thedra),
whose failed prophecy of earth-shaking events
in December 1954 attracted worldwide atten¬
tion and became the subject of an influential
case study in the sociology of religion.

See Also: Ashtar; Channeling; Hierarchal Board; Sis¬
ter Thedra

Further Reading

Festinger, Leon, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley
Schachter, 1956. When Prophecy Fails. Min¬
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Tuella [pseud, of Thelma B. Turrell], ed., 1989.
Ashtar: A Tribute. Third edition. Salt Lake City,
UT: Guardian Action Publications.

Sasquatch

Sasquatch—also known as Bigfoot—is a large
apelike creature unrecognized by zoology but
often reported seen in the forests of the Pacific
Northwest of the United States and Canada’s
far west. To those few scientists who are willing
to concede its possible existence, Sasquatch is
thought to be related to Homo sapiens primate
ancestors. In other words, though intelligent as

217

218

Saint Michael casting the dragon Satan and his angels down to Earth (Fortean Picture Library)

Sasquatch 219

A photograph of the track of a huge animal, seen by Mount Everest climbers and said to be made by the Abominable
Snowman, 1958. Similar creatures, generally called Bigfoot or Sasquatch, are often reported in the forests of the Pacific
Northwest of the United States and Canada’s far west. (Bettmann/Corbis)

animals go, it does not have human, much less
superhuman, intelligence. There are, however,
individuals who claim contacteelike dealings
with Sasquatch, which they describe as highly
evolved beings with extraordinary mental
powers.

Southern California psychic Joyce Partise,
holding a sealed envelope containing a pho¬
tograph of an alleged Sasquatch footprint,
declared that “there’s a civilization of thou¬
sands” of “gorilla men” who live under¬
ground and are “able to communicate with
those in outer space” (Slate, 1976). Some
witnesses assert that when they tried to take
photographs or collect other direct evidence
of their Sasquatch sightings, the creatures
used a kind of hypnosis to prevent them
from acting.

Still others say they have received detailed
psychic messages, often consisting of spiri¬
tual and ecological material. The Sasquatch
may appear, at least initially, as no more
than a pair of glowing eyes or a ball of light
that can enter anywhere, even into closed
houses and bedrooms. They can also change
shapes. In a handful of cases, UFO witnesses
say they have seen apelike creatures during
close encounters, and a small number of ab¬
duction incidents recount onboard interac¬
tions with Sasquatch creatures, seen in the
company of (relatively) more conventional
humanoids.

See Also: Abductions by UFOs; Contactees

Further Reading

Chorvinsky, Mark, 1994. “Our Strange World.” Fate
47, 10 (October): 22-24.

220 Satonians

Fenwick, Lawrence J., 1983. “Multiple Abductions
in Canada.” MUFON UFO Journal Pt. I. 183
(May): 10-13; Pt. II. 184 (June): 3-6.

Halpin, Marjorie, and Michael M. Ames, eds., 1980.
Manlike Monsters on Trial: Early Records and
Modern Evidence. Vancouver: University of
British Columbia Press.

Slate, B. Ann, 1976. “Gods from Inner Space.” UFO
Report 3, 1 (April): 36-38, 51-52, 54.

Slate, B. Ann, and Alan Berry, 1976. Bigfoot. New
York: Bantam Books.

Satonians

Satonians, according to the Solar Cross Foun¬
dation, a onetime organization of contactee
sympathizers, are evil space people. They look
exactly like good space people, but persons
who encounter them can detect their negative
thoughts. They also respond ambiguously and
evasively when asked to identify themselves.
Satonians always lose in conflicts with their
benevolent counterparts. A person approach¬
ing a spacecraft should be certain it is not a
Satonian ship.

See Also: Contactees

Further Reading

Tuella [pseud, of Thelma B. Turrell], ed., 1989.
Ashtar: A Tribute. Third edition. Salt Lake City,
UT: Guardian Action Publications.

Secret Chiefs

“Secret Chiefs” are shadowy superhuman
adepts who have used their magical power and
knowledge to initiate and guide occult groups
and hidden societies.

According to British occultist S. L. Mac¬
Gregor Mathers (1854-1918), who claimed
to have met the Secret Chiefs on a number of
occasions, these people or entities are able to
live in both physical and psychic bodies. They
are, he told a correspondent, “possessed of ter¬
rible . . . powers. ... I felt I was in contact
with a force so terrible that I can only com¬
pare it to the shock one would receive from
being near a flash of lightning during a great
thunderstorm” (Keith, 1997).

Further Reading

Keith, Jim, 1997. Casebook on the Men in Black. Lil-
burn, GA: IllumiNet Press.

Semjase

Semjase is best known in contactee circles as a
beautiful spacewoman from the planet Erra
in the Pleiades star system. Eduard “Billy”
Meier of Switzerland claims to have met her
after her “beamship” landed on his farm on
the afternoon of January 28, 1975, initiating
a series of contacts that made Meier the most
well known and controversial of the second-
generation contactees. Meier would allege
trips through space and time in the company
of Semjase and her associates, and he would
produce photographs said to depict her but
thought by critics to be a model in a Sears
catalog.

According to Meier, Semjase is around 350
years old, though she looks to be in her twen¬
ties. She is blond, blue-eyed, and fair-skinned.
Her only extraterrestrial characteristic is her
extended earlobes. Because she possesses
knowledge remarkable even by Pleiadian stan¬
dards, she is considered an Jshrjsh (ish-rish), a
sort of demigoddess. Before meeting Meier in
1975, she spent eight years in the DAL Uni¬
verse (a twin parallel universe to the Earth’s,
known as the DERN Universe) in the com¬
pany of Asket, a DAL native woman who had
assisted Meier through his early—child and
young-adult—interactions with extraterrestri¬
als. She then left the DAL Universe and re¬
turned briefly to Erra before arriving in Eu¬
rope. Meier insists that her orders were to
work exclusively on that continent.

While visiting the headquarters of the
Meier movement, the Semjase Silver Star
Center in Hinterschmidruti, Switzerland, on
December 15, 1977, she suffered a life-threat¬
ening accident. A beamship rushed her back
to Erra for medical treatment. On returning
the followed May, she resumed contact with
Meier. Those contacts ended on March 16,
1981, when other duties kept her away until
early 1984. Their final contact occurred on
February 3, 1984, Meier’s forty-seventh birth¬
day. The following November, complications
from her 1977 accident led to a health emer¬
gency. She was taken to the DAL Universe to
begin the decades-long process of recovery.

Seth 221

Fred Bell of Laguna Beach, California, has
his own Semjase tales to tell, to Meier’s in¬
tense displeasure. An inventor, musician,
artist, and holistic-health enthusiast, Bell—a
committed believer in pyramid energy—once
went about in the world with a small pyramid
on his head. He says that beginning in 1971
he received mental impressions of an oddly fa¬
miliar, beautiful blond woman. Eventually, he
became convinced that he had known her in a
previous lifetime, when he was an archaeolo¬
gist who uncovered evidence that Paladins
landed on Earth long ago. Soon Bell met
Semjase personally. At first she would not give
him her name, but when they got close—ap¬
parently even having a sexual relationship for
a time—she told him her life history and re¬
vealed the secrets of the Pleiadians. She helped
him with various projects and inventions. Bell
came to refer to Semjase as his “soul mate.”
He also met her father, Ptaah, and others.

For a time, Bell was on friendly terms with
Wendelle C. Stevens, an Arizona man most
responsible for bringing Meier’s claims to an
American audience. Stevens has published a
series of books based on his investigations in
Switzerland and also on Meier’s contact di¬
aries. At first Stevens cited Bell’s claims as in¬
dependent evidence for the existence of Sem¬
jase and Pleiadean visitors.

In due course, however, Meier denounced
Bell’s stories as lies. A Pleiadian named Quet¬
zal told Meier that Bell could not possibly be
telling the truth because Semjase and Ptaah
had never been to America. Moreover, the
Pleiadians entered into physical contact only
with Meier, and nobody else. Quetzal was
among the extraterrestrials with whom Bell
supposedly interacted.

One fundamentalist Christian writer holds
that Meier got the name “Semjase” from the
fallen angel/demon Shemyaza, described in
the apocryphal Book of Enoch. Or it might
be the Semjase, a real entity, that is one of
Satan’s emissaries, one of the “many evil de¬
ceptive forces at work in the world right now”
(“Billy Meier and the Swiss UFO Case,” n.d.).

See Also: Contactees; Meier, Eduard “Billy”

Further Reading

“Billy Meier and the Swiss UFO Case,” n.d. http://
netpci.com/-tttbbs/Articles-UFO/semjase.html.

Meier, “Billy” Eduard Albert, n.d. “‘Billy’ Eduard Al¬
bert Meier Dissociates Elimself from Dr. Fred
Bell’s Lies and Claims.” http://www.figu.ch/us/
critics/contra/bell.htm.

Steiger, Brad, 1988. The Fellowship: Spiritual Contact
Between Humans and Outer Space Beings. New
York: Dolphin/Doubleday.

Seth

Jane Roberts’s channeling of Seth had large
impact on the emerging New Age movement
in the 1960s. Seth first appeared when the
Elmira, New York, writer and her husband
were playing with a ouija board in 1963. Soon
Roberts learned how to put herself into a
trance state and let Seth—whom she thought
of less as a spirit than as some kind of intelli¬
gent energy force—speak through her. She
recorded these sessions and used a few of
them in a book, How to Develop Your ESP
Power (1966), later reissued as The Coming of
Seth (1976).

In 1970, with the publication of The Seth
Material, Roberts commenced writing a se¬
ries of books, most of them focused on
Seth’s teachings. In time, a Seth movement
came into existence on the New Age scene.
Roberts also started channeling William
James, the great American psychologist,
philosopher, and psychical researcher, and
releasing books based upon James’s alleged
postmortem observations and experiences.
Unlike some channelers who would follow
her, Roberts remained reclusive and public¬
ity-shy and rarely appeared in public. She
died on September 5, 1984. After her death
other channelers claimed to have heard from
Seth. One, Thomas Massari, reported that
Seth had communicated with him as early as
1972.

See Also: Channeling

Further Reading

Roberts, Jane, 1970. The Seth Material. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Elall.

-, 1972. Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the

Sold. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Elall.

222 Shaari

-, 1978. The Afierdeath Journal ofan American

Philosopher: The World View of William James. En¬
glewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

-, 1981. The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto.

Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Shaari

Shaari is an extraterrestrial who inhabits the
body of a young professional woman. The
woman, an occasional practitioner of channel¬
ing, was seriously injured in a car accident.
After the accident, she decided that she had
served her life purpose and would go on to
another level of existence, though without
“dying”; instead, she gave her body to a being
of higher consciousness. This being would be
able to observe and offer insight into upcom¬
ing planetary changes that will affect every¬
body who lives on Earth.

The Intergalactic Council of Twelve (con¬
sisting of space people and angels) and the
Star Command, working with the earth-
woman, carefully effected the change over a
period of six months between January and
July 1989. On July 14, the exchange occurred.
By this time, the woman was out of the hospi¬
tal and had resumed a part-time occupation,
the conducting of channeling workshops. The
woman was holding one on an island in the
Pacific Northwest when she was instructed to
go to the south part of the island, lie down on
the shore, and breathe rhythmically. Shaari,
waiting in a spaceship in the company of
Ashtar and others, found herself enveloped in
light and drawn into the womans body.

“Everything that I was familiar with had
just shifted,” she recalled. “There I was in a
body that felt like concrete. Nothing moved,
everything felt very heavy. ... As I started to
think about moving, these awkward fleshy
limbs began to respond and jerk and twitch.
Finally, I managed to get on my feet and even¬
tually made it back to the workshop site. The
people there were wonderful and took care of
me in all ways.” Shaari says her mission is to
“bridge the gap between human and extrater¬
restrial communication and to establish the

potential for technological exchange and in¬
terplanetary trade” (Shaari, 1994).

Prior to her incarnation on Earth, Shaari
was a commander in the Star Command,
which she had served for most of her 750
years. She was born a Pleiadian/Arcturian hy¬
brid “created out of the thoughts of a
Pleiadean and Arcturian council.” In other
words, she did not have biological parents.
Even so, she has a family and a mate named
Mishar, a Star Command officer, counselor,
and healer. Nearly seven feet tall, he hails
from Arcturus, which means that he has a
spectacular set of wings. These wings allow
him to shift consciousness and to run through
different color, light, and sound frequencies.
With this power he monitors the fluctuations
of mass human consciousness, which can have
an adverse effect on weather patterns. If neces¬
sary, he shifts that consciousness in a more
positive direction toward less destructive
weather. Mishar also seeks an earthly incarna¬
tion but has yet to find an Earth male who is
willing to surrender his consciousness in ex¬
change for Mishar’s.

The British Columbia woman who now
calls herself Shaari claims to have all memories
of her extraterrestrial life available to her in
waking consciousness. Though she can chan¬
nel, she does not often do so because she does
not have the need.

See Also: Ashtar; Channeling; Hybrid beings

Further Reading

Shaari, 1994. “An Extraterrestrials Journey to
Earth.” http://www.spiritweb.org/Spirit/et-jour-
ney.html.

Shan

Shan is a name space people sometimes call
the Earth. Shan is regarded as a troubled
planet strongly influenced by dark forces. Its
reputation is such that spaceships from other
worlds have come here both to protect extra¬
terrestrials from human influence and to re¬
form humans and defeat Satan.

According to the pseudonymous contactee
Patrick J. Bellringer, Shan is undergoing radi-

Shaver mystery 223

cal changes now that it has been permitted to
move from the third dimension to the fourth
dimension. In 1962, Shan entered the Photon
Belt, an invisible band of powerful light en¬
ergy, as it began the transition which contin¬
ues now but which will be completed in the
early years of the twenty-first century. Begin¬
ning on August 17, 1987, Shan was led a dis¬
tance of thirteen million light years into a new
orbit closer to the Great Central Sun as mil¬
lions of starships, using powerful magnetic
beams, transferred it to another solar system
in the Pleiades. The process was completed on
December 15, 1995. Sahn is now the fourth
planet in the orbit of Coeleno (see- lee-no).

Few human beings have noticed the transi¬
tion because the space people have gone to
great lengths to conceal their operation. If the
sky looks familiar, appearances are deceptive;
the familiar stars and planets have been re¬
placed by hovering starships, which take care
to remain in precisely the same configuration
as the constellations of old. Only the most ob¬
servant have realized that the sun is emitting
more intense light but looks smaller (because
we are now seven million miles farther away
from our new sun so as to adjust for the dif¬
ferences from the old one). Our new moon is
brighter because of Coeleno’s more brilliant
light. Soon Shan will be moved into the spiri¬
tually advanced fourth dimension, but not be¬
fore all kinds of devastating changes occur.
Radical weather changes, massive volcanic
eruptions, and other cataclysms will wipe out
the unenlightened parts of humanity (un¬
aware of but still under Satan’s influence) so
that only those who are morally pure and in¬
tellectually superior will survive to enter the
new realm.

Among the victims will be Satan and his
minions, who live on Shan but remain oblivi¬
ous to the Earth’s new location in space. The
space people will launch a surprise attack on
Satan and drive him and his troops into the
void where they can no longer do harm.

According to Bellringer—himself reincar¬
nated from the Coeleno system but from the
fifth planet, Hatonn, to which he and his

Pleiadean family will return soon—Shan from
the beginning was regarded as a planet of un¬
usual attractiveness. Two hundred six million
years ago immigrants from the Pleiades—our
ancestors—settled on it. Bellringer states that
Shan “held a position at the cross-roads of the
Cosmos as a supply planet for other planets.
Because of its abundance and beauty it was
chosen as the ‘prison’ planet by Lucifer, the
Arch-Angel when he left the Cosmic Realms
for his anarchy against God/Aton.” Because of
the presence of Satan and his allies, the people
of Shan have had an extremely difficult time
achieving “complete harmony and balance
with the Laws of God and of the Creation.”
Among other things, Satan has kept humans
ignorant or fearful of the extraterrestrial races
that are visiting Shan and attempting to
change it for the better. “Shan has been a spe¬
cial schoolroom for the ‘gifted kids’—a tough
course to learn tough lessons. Sadly enough,
most have failed the course” (Bellringer, n.d.).

See Also: Contactees

Further Reading

Bellringer, Patrick H., n.d. “People of the Lie: The
Photon Belt.” http://www.fourwindslO.com/
phb/photon.htm.

Shaver mystery

The Shaver mystery is named after Richard
Sharpe Shaver. Shaver’s strange claims about
his experiences with cavern-dwelling deros
(deranged and vicious) and teros (virtuous but
overwhelmed), warring remnants of an an¬
cient earthly race and possessors of advanced
technologies, were featured prominently in
the popular science-fiction pulp Amazing Sto -
ties between 1944 and 1948. Amazing’s editor,
Ray Palmer, promoted Shaver’s stories for the
next three decades, and Shaver continued to
tell them until his death.

The genesis of the episode was a letter the
heretofore obscure Shaver wrote to Amazing in
1943. The letter purported to be a reproduc¬
tion of an ancient alphabet from Lemuria, a
lost continent said to have sunk into the Pacific
Ocean some twelve thousand years ago (in real-

224 Shaver mystery

Cover of The Hidden World magazine, spring 1961,
containing articles on the Shaver mystery (Fortean Picture
Library)

ity, Lemuria is a nineteenth-century invention).
Palmer published it in Amazings January 1944
issue. By then, he and Shaver were correspon¬
ding. Shaver produced a ten-thousand-word
manuscript titled “A Warning to Future Man,”
which Palmer rewrote as a science-fiction
novella, “I Remember Lemuria!” The story ap¬
peared under Shavers by-line in the March
1945 issue. Palmer presented it as a true story
based on racial memory, though Shaver
claimed that he had received his knowledge of
humanity’s hidden history direcdy from beings
who live in a vast network of tunnels and caves
under the Earth’s surface.

The response was a flood of letters from
curious readers and some from persons who
related unusual experiences that they thought
validated Shaver. A promotional genius with
the instincts of a carnival barker, Palmer
coined the phrase “Shaver mystery,” started a
Shaver Mystery Club, and opened Amazings

pages to allegedly factual material and science-
fiction stories based on it. Palmer wrote that
when he visited Richard and Dorothy Shaver
at their farm, he heard mysterious voices that
“could not have come from Mr. Shaver’s lips.”
They were speaking first in English then in a
“strange language,” about a woman who ear¬
lier that day had been “torn into four quarters
about four miles away and four miles down
[from the Shaver house]” (Palmer, 1961).

At least in its most vital phase, the Shaver
mystery ended in 1948, when pressure from
outraged science-fiction fans led Ziff-Davis,
Amazings publisher, to order its closing. That
same year Palmer and Curds Fuller founded
Fate, dedicated to the “true mysteries” Amaz -
ing had featured along with Shaver matters,
and he left the science-fiction magazine the
following year. Not long afterward, Palmer
moved to Amherst, Wisconsin, where he
started Mystic (later Search) and Other Worlds
(later Flying Saucers). These publications car¬
ried articles by and about Shaver. Between
1961 and 1964, Palmer published sixteen is¬
sues of a trade-paper-formatted magazine, The
Hidden World, devoted entirely to the Shaver
mystery. Shaver died in 1975. Palmer, who
had continued to champion the “mystery”
while disputing some of Shaver’s interpreta¬
tions, died two years later.

Though to all but a few Shaver’s claims
were outlandish and absurd, even grotesque,
Shaver did not strike those who knew him as a
hoaxer. There seemed little doubt that Shaver
believed what he said, notwithstanding some
noteworthy inconsistencies in his testimony
over the years. For example, he told at least
four mutually exclusive stories about how he
learned of the Earth’s secret past and its sub¬
terranean races. In his most frequent telling,
however, it occurred first through telepathic
messages from a mysterious woman, then as
mental voices emanating from depraved crea¬
tures known as “deros” (from “z/ftrimental ro -
hots,” though they were not robots as such;
see explanation on next page).

These experiences seem to have occurred in
the early 1930s. Always vague on dates,

Shaver mystery 225

Shaver was also vague on what was happening
in his life amid his growing realization of, and
interaction with, the reality of a literal under¬
ground. It appears, from uncertain though
not entirely implausible inference, that he
spent some time in a mental hospital, and he
may also have served a short prison stretch for
bootlegging. On occasion Shaver intimated as
much, even as he less plausibly claimed to
have lived in the caves with the embattled
teros (“inttgrative robots”; again, like their en¬
emies the deros, beings of flesh and blood).
How long he supposedly lived there is also
unclear.

In any event, out of these elements came a
complex, alternate history of the human race.
Long ago, according to Shaver, extraterrestri¬
als known as Atlans and Titans or the Elder
Races colonized the Earth. (The Atlans lived
on Atlantis, the Titans on Lemuria.) These be¬
ings, who possessed fantastic technologies,
lived extraordinarily long lives and never
stopped growing, owing to the integrative
(positive) energies cast out by the sun. Some
grew to fifty feet, a few considerably more.
Eventually, however, the sun changed and
began to beam detrimental (negative) energy,
causing, among other effects, aging and mor¬
tality. To block the deadly rays, the Elders
built an immense Cavern World to house the
Earth’s fifty billion Atlans and Titans. But the
effort ultimately failed, and twelve thousand
years ago the Elders who survived fled to
other stars, leaving behind a small population,
which had fallen victim to the detrimental ra¬
diation. Some wandered to the surface and in
time forgot their history as they became the
mortal and confused Homo sapiens. The oth¬
ers stayed in the caves to become the sadistic,
cannibalistic idiots called deros. One other
group, the smallest of the three, was the teros,
who had escaped the negative rays but who,
for various reasons, had not joined the exodus
from Earth. Both the deros and the teros were
“robots” not because they were walking me¬
chanical contraptions but because they were
under the influence of, respectively, negative
and positive energies.

The deros used the advanced technologies
to torment surface-dwellers. As Palmer ex¬
plained it, they “have death rays, giant rockets
that traverse in the upper air . . . ground vehi¬
cles of tremendous power, machines for the
revitalizing of sex, known as ‘stim’ machines
(in which these degenerates sometimes spend
their whole lives in a sexual debauch that ac¬
tually deforms their bodies in horrible
ways) . . . and ben rays which heal and restore
the body but are also capable of restoring lost
energy after a debauch” [Palmer, 1961]). Be¬
sides causing plane crashes, madness, violence,
and other maladies on the surface, deros
sometimes abduct human beings, usually
women, and subject them to hideous tortures.
Their rays cloud human thought and keep
them oblivious to the deros’ existence. The
badly outnumbered teros are engaged in a
protracted but ultimately futile conflict with
their evil counterparts.

After its exile from Amazing, the Shaver mys¬
tery passed from the attention of all but a tiny
band of occult and true-mystery enthusiasts,
who continued to report on and speculate
about deros and caverns in amateurish newslet¬
ters as well as Palmer’s periodicals. The “mys¬
tery” figured in a few not widely read UFO-era
books, including Eric Norman’s The Under-Peo -
pie (1969) and Brinsley le Poer Trench’s Secret of
the Ages: UFOs from inside the Earth (1974).
Several writers of a skeptical bent have argued
that through Shaver, as one puts it, Palmer “al¬
most single-handedly created the myth of
UFOs as extraterrestrial visitors” (Kafton-
Minkel, 1989). In fact, a connection between
the Shaver mystery and the international UFO
phenomenon of the past five decades has yet to
be demonstrated. Flying saucers as such did not
enter Shaverian mythology until after the rest of
the world started talking about them.

A more interesting issue concerns the moti¬
vations of the principals. Shaver’s manifest be¬
lief in experiences that could not have hap¬
pened in consensus reality leads some, such as
hollow-earth chronicler Walter Kafton-Min-
kel, to see Shaver as a visionary, “a member of
that ancient fellowship of receivers of revealed

226 Shaw’s Martians

knowledge,” a prophet like Moses or Joseph
Smith though without the religious trappings.
Even if Shaver technologized hell, he remained
to the end an atheist and a materialist. To him
the caverns existed in this world and had noth¬
ing to do with the supernatural.

Though usually depicted as a cynical ex¬
ploiter of a deluded man whom any responsi¬
ble adult would have directed to the nearest
psychiatrist, Palmer himself—for all his pro¬
motional instincts, which he exercised vigor¬
ously in the long course of his association
with Shaver—may have been caught up in the
belief in at least something. Perhaps, he some¬
times suggested in public statements, Shaver’s
experiences had occurred on the “astral realm”
(Steinberg, 1973). On one occasion, he de¬
fended the “mystery” in private circumstances
in which he not only had nothing to gain but
also risked looking foolish. Though we will
never know for sure, one reasonable reading
of Palmer’s role in the affair is that this com¬
plex man was both believer and exploiter.

See Also: Atlantis; Brodies deros; Hollow earth;
Lemuria; Mount Lassen

Further Reading

Kafton-Minkel, Walter, 1989. Subterranean Worlds:
100,000 Years of Dragons, Dwarf, the Dead, Lost
Races and UFOs from inside the Earth. Port
Townsend, WA: Loompanics Unlimited.

Palmer, Ray, 1961. “Invitation to Adventure.” The
Hidden WorldA-\ (Spring): 4—14.

-, 1980. “The Dero and the Tero.” Gray

Barker’s Newsletter 12 (July): 7.

Shaver, Richard S., 1945. “I Remember Lemuria!”
Amazing Stories 19, 1 (March): 12-70.

Steinberg, Gene, 1971. “The Caveat Emptor Inter¬
view: Ray Palmer.” Caveat Emptor 1 (Fall): 9-12,
26.

-, 1973. “The Caveat Emptor Interview:

Richard S. Shaver.” Caveat Emptor 10 (Novem¬
ber/December): 5-10.

Wright, Bruce Lanier, 1999. “From Hero to Dero.”
Fortean Times 127 (October): 36-41.

Shaw’s Martians

In November 1896, unidentified “airships”—
what today would be called UFOs—were re¬
ported over northern California, initiating a
flurry of sightings and excitement that within

months would move eastward until all of
America was affected. This was the first UFO
wave in America, and on November 25, 1896,
the first ever UFO abduction occurred—if
one credits the testimony of Colonel H. G.
Shaw, who claimed a near escape from capture
by Martians.

Shaw told his story two days later in a letter
published in the Stockton Evening Mail, a Cal¬
ifornia paper on whose editorial staff he had
once served. On the day of his adventure, he
and a companion, Camille Spooner, left Lodi
at six o’clock in the morning and were quietly
moving along when their horse abruptly
snorted in terror and stopped in its tracks.
“Three strange beings . . . nearly or quite
seven feet high and very slender,” of more or
less human appearance, strange beauty, and
nudity, stood in front of them on the road.
When Shaw approached them and asked
where they came from, they gave a response
that to his ear sounded like “warbling.”
Speaking to each other, their voices gave off a
“monotonous chant.” They had small hands,
delicate-looking and without fingernails, and
long, narrow feet. When he briefly touched
one, Shaw had the impression that the being
weighed no more than an ounce. He wrote,

They . . . were covered with a natural
growth ... as soft as silk to the touch, and
their skin was like velvet. Their faces and heads
were without hair, the ears were very small, and
the nose had the appearance of polished ivory,
while the eyes were large and lustrous. The
mouth, however, was small, and it seemed to
me that they were without teeth. That and
other things led me to believe that they neither
ate nor drank, and that life was sustained by
some sort of gas. Each of them had swung
under the left arm a bag to which was attached
a nozzle, and every little while one or the other
would place the nozzle in his mouth, at which
time I heard a sound as of escaping gas.

(Bullard, 1982)

Each also carried an egg-sized device that cast
an “intense but not unpleasant light” when
opened.

Shiva 227

At this point the beings—whom Shaw pre¬
sumed to be from Mars—tried to carry him
and his friend away, but weighing as little as
they did, they lacked the strength. So they
turned around and flashed lights in the direc¬
tion of a nearby bridge. The two men then
perceived an airship, some one-hundred fifty
feet long, hovering twenty feet over the water.
The three Martians floated with a swaying
motion toward the craft. A door opened on
the side, and the trio disappeared inside. The
ship flew away and was seen no more.

Concluding his letter, Shaw blasted other
airship stories as “clumsy fakes” that “should
not be given credence by anyone”—presum¬
ably with tongue buried deeply in cheek. Be¬
sides being the first known alien encounter in
America to see print, Shaw’s was also the first
of many hoaxes to come in the months ahead,
as newspaper columns were filled with out¬
landish tales of airships and their occupants,
extraterrestrial and human.

See Also: Abductions by UFOs; Allingham’s Mart¬
ian; Aurora Martian; Brown’s Martians; Calf¬
rustling aliens; Dentons’s Martians and Venu-
sians; Hopkins’s Martians; Khauga; Lethbridge’s
aeronauts; Martian bees; Michigan giant; Mince-
Pie Martians; Monka; Muller’s Martians; Smead’s
Martians; Smith; Wilcox’s Martians; Wilson

Further Reading

Sheep-killing alien

In early 1968, according to a Bolivian news¬
paper, a farm woman near Otoco went to her
sheep corral early one evening to discover that
a strange net had been placed over it. A hu¬
manlike figure, four feet tall and wearing a
bulky-looking spacesuit, was busy slaughter¬
ing sheep with a tubular, hooked instrument.
After killing the animals, he would dump
their entrails into a bag.

The woman shouted at him and hurled
stones in his direction. The alien strolled over

to a boxlike instrument with a wheel at the
top. As he twisted the wheel, the net was
withdrawn into the box. As he was so en¬
gaged, the witness had picked up a club and
was about to use it on the intruder. In re¬
sponse, he threw his weapon at her. Each time
it returned to his hands like a boomerang, and
each time it passed the woman, it cut her.
Gathering his tools, the alien then floated
noisily upward and was lost to sight.

The local police colonel counted thirty-
four dead sheep. Each had had some of its di¬
gestive organs removed.

See Also: Calf-rustling aliens; Close encounters of
the third kind

Further Reading

Galindez, Oscar A., 1970. “Violent Humanoid En¬
countered in Bolivia.” Flying Saucer Review 16, 4
(July/August): 15-17.

Shiva

Shiva is usually known as a major Hindu god,
associated both with destruction and chaos
and with wisdom and meditation. But in Feb¬
ruary and March 1994, Shiva—“the blood,
the muscle, fur, bone, and spirit of animals”—
communicated through Sedona, Arizona, psy¬
chic Toraya Ayres. He spoke from and for the
animal point of view. He described himself
once as having the physique of a bear, another
time calling himself only a “body of energy”
and denying that he had any physical body.

Shiva said that human beings need to reex¬
amine their destructive relationship with ani¬
mals. Humans should not see animals as infe¬
rior to them but as equal but different
spiritual beings. Animals do not have a con¬
cept of God, but they do have a profound un¬
derstanding of their place in nature’s order.
“We do live in an eternal now of loving coop¬
eration within nature, which we recognize
without words as a divine force, and as many
divine energies working together for the
greater good.” Like humans, animals evolve
and move into higher dimensions “in a differ¬
ent vibrational range.”

“The physical world that you know is only
a tiny part of reality,” according to Shiva.

228 Shovar

“You will be exploring the nonphysical worlds
and dimensions, too. As multi-dimensional
beings you already do this in your dreams, but
you will soon do it consciously.”

Further Reading

Ayres, Toraya, 1997. “Messages from the Animal
Kingdom.” http://www.spiritweb.org/Spirit/ani-
mal-kingdom-ayres.html.

Shovar

Shovar is the name of a humanlike entity the
pseudonymous Rachel Jones of Coeur d’A¬
lene, Idaho, allegedly met during a UFO-
abduction experience over a two-hour period
between June 20 and 21, 1977.

Awakened at 11:55 RM. when she heard
someone walking upstairs, Jones found her¬
self paralyzed. She saw someone enter the
room, then felt a lifting sensation. In what
seemed an instant, she regained her ability to
move. She was astonished to see that it was
then 1:57 A.M.

Under hypnosis conducted by psycholo¬
gist/ufologist R. Leo Sprinkle, she told of see¬
ing an ugly intruder with no pupils in his
eyes, a thin-lined mouth, normal-looking
nose, and thinning hair. He had four lingers
on each hand but no thumbs. Picking her up,
he brought her to an unknown place and
passed through a door into a chamber with a
cold floor. Three other beings were there. One
was human or near-human in appearance.
The man accompanied her into another room
containing various instruments, including
two wheel-shaped devices and a boxlike table.
She sat on the table and conversed with the
man, who said his name was Shovar. He asked
her to take off her shirt. After resisting, she re¬
luctantly did so. Shovar expressed puzzlement
about her suntan, which she then explained to
him.

She was instructed to lie on her stomach as
a light shined on her back. The other beings
rubbed a liquid on her shoulders. It caused
great pain, and she protested. Shovar said the
pain would stop, and it did. She did not ac¬

cept his apology, however. It did not sound
sincere, and, moreover, she got the distinct
impression that he did not even know what
pain was.

Even under hypnosis Jones could not re¬
call what happened next. Her memory
picked up with a conversation with Shovar,
who she realized was communicating tele-
pathically. Shovar told her that they had
changed her so that she would be “better for
others.” They had met before, he went on,
and they would meet again. Asked why they
had taken her, he replied that he could not
answer the question right then. Three beings
entered the room, and Jones abruptly found
herself back in bed.

Headaches plagued her for the next few
days, and she noticed a small round scar on
her shoulder.

See Also: Abductions by UFOs; Sprinkle, Ronald
Leo

Further Reading

“Idaho Abduction Case,” 1977. The APRO Bulletin
(November).

Sinat Schirah (Stan)

Since 1983, Sinat Schirah, known affection¬
ately as Stan, has channeled through Arlene
Nelson. Three years later, Nelson began a
process she called “pure channeling”—chan¬
neling so intense that she had no conscious
sense of it while it was happening or con¬
scious memory of it afterward. It would take
place one weekend every month between Jan¬
uary and May.

She and her husband, Mervin “Beaver”
Colver, with whom Nelson believes she has
shared a number of incarnations, founded
Lifelight University in Mill Valley, California,
in 1987. Students are instructed in a variety of
New Age beliefs and practices. Stan’s chan¬
neled messages are preserved on tapes and in
books.

See Also: Channeling

Further Reading

Melton, J. Gordon, 1996. Encyclopedia of Ameri -
can Religions. Fifth edition. Detroit, MI: Gale
Research.

Sister Thedra 229

Sister Thedra

Sister Thedra was bom Dorothy Martin, but
to most of the world she is remembered as
“Marian Keach,” the pseudonym given her in
the classic sociological book When Prophecy
Fails (1956). In 1954, through space people
who communicated with her through auto¬
matic writing, she learned of an imminent
catastrophic, earth-changing event, to occur a
week before the end of the year. She and her
small band of followers in Illinois and Michi¬
gan would be swooped up in a flying saucer
and rescued just before the cataclysm took
place. Martin and her followers sought to
publicize the prophecy, only to be ridiculed in
newspapers all over the country. After the fail¬
ure of the prophecy, Martin—soon renamed
“Sister Thedra” at the urging of her space con¬
tacts—moved to the Southwest, then to Peru
for five years. Returning to the United States,
she established and headed a contactee-ori-
ented spiritual group in Mount Shasta, Cali¬
fornia. Toward the end of her life, she relo¬
cated to Sedona, Arizona, and died there in
1992.

Born in 1900 in West Virginia, Martin dis¬
covered occultism in the late 1930s while liv¬
ing in New York City. First attracted to
Theosophy, she explored the spectrum of eso¬
teric literature and became an early student of
Dianetics (from which Scientology grew). She
also read the works of Guy Warren Ballard,
creator of the I AM movement, arguably the
first religious group to make extraterrestrial
contacts a central tenet. Another book, Oah -
spe, recorded the 1881 channeling of John
Ballough Newbrough, depicting a richly pop¬
ulated spiritual cosmos whose inhabitants in¬
clude guardian angels known as “ashars” who
sail the universe in etheric ships. When flying
saucers came on the scene and the contactee
movement followed in their wake, Martin fol¬
lowed developments with interest.

In the meantime, Charles and Lillian Laug-
head (pronounced Law- head) were doing the
same. Their own odyssey had begun in 1946,
when the couple were Protestant medical mis¬
sionaries in Egypt and Lillian started suffering

seemingly untreatable nightmares and fears.
Seeking relief, the couple turned to occultism.
On their return to the United States in 1949,
Dr. Laughead took up a staff position at the
Michigan State College Hospital in East Lans¬
ing. He and his wife continued their mystical
studies, incorporating flying saucers into their
newfound faith. In early 1953, on a trip to
southern California, Laughead met George
Adamski, whose claimed meeting with a
Venusian named Orthon in the California
desert was causing a worldwide sensation. Of
particular interest to Laughead were the foot¬
prints the Venusian had left in the desert sand.
They contained enigmatic symbols whose
meaning Adamski’s followers were already dis¬
cussing and debating.

Laughead returned to Michigan with draw¬
ings of the prints, which his wife devoted the
next five months to deciphering. She con¬
cluded that the left print’s symbols depicted
the sinking of the lost continents Atlantis and
Lemuria, the right their reemergence from the
ocean floor following geological cataclysms
that soon would befall the planet.

Through an automatic-writing message
given him by an acquaintance, Dr. Laughead
heard from the “Elder Brother,” who later, ac¬
cording to Laughead, “identified himself as
being Jesus the Christ and also Sananda.”
Laughead was to continue his work with
saucers, and soon Venusians would contact
him.

At this stage, the Laugheads had not heard
of Dorothy Martin. They did not know that
she also was in psychic contact with the Elder
Brother as well as with a group of beings she
called the Guardians. In April 1954, one of
the latter introduced himself as Sananda from
the planet Clarion. In a previous lifetime,
Sananda said, he was Jesus. Martin—or at
least her unconscious mind—got the name
Clarion from contactee Truman Bethurum,
but Bethurum’s Clarion was a planet on the
other side of the moon; Martin/Sananda’s
Clarion, on the other hand, existed in the
etheric realm. A companion planet, Cerus
(sometimes confusingly referred to also as a

230 Sister Thedra

“constellation”), housed other space people
who kept Martin’s arm and hand in furious
motion with automatic writing as they made
good on their promise to teach her cosmic
wisdom. The Elder Brother promised that he
would return “soon. . . . They that have told
you that they do not believe shall see us when
the time is right” (Festinger et ah, 1956).

Martin’s messages were attracting atten¬
tion, and a handful of followers soon came
together in the Chicago area. Among those
who spoke with Martin was John Otto, a
UFO lecturer of national reputation and no¬
table credulity. Visiting Detroit to hear a lec¬
ture by Adamski, Otto met the Faugheads,
who informed him of their saucer interests
and experiences. Otto in turn urged them to
get in touch with Martin. Soon afterward,
they wrote and introduced themselves. All of
this seemed particularly significant to Martin
when she received a message urging her to go
to East Fansing to seek “a child ... to whom I
am trying to get through with light.” When
informed, Mrs. Faughead immediately con¬
cluded that she was the “child” (Festinger, et
al, 1956).

After the Faugheads met Martin in Oak
Park in early June 1954, the three formed a
close association that would profoundly affect
their lives and fortunes in the months and
years to come. By this time, Martin was re¬
ceiving as many as ten messages a day, all of
them ominous, all warning of imminent dis¬
asters and cataclysms. The news was not en¬
tirely bad: Those who would “listen and be¬
lieve” would enter a New Age of knowledge
and happiness. The messages got more spe¬
cific. Spaceships would land soon, and se¬
lected individuals would be flown to other
planets, along with space people who had
been on secret Earth assignment.

On August 1, Martin, the Faugheads, and
nine believers showed up at a Chicago-area
military base, where they had been told a fly¬
ing saucer would land at noon. No ship
showed up, but the next day Sananda in¬
formed her through automatic writing that he
was the stranger the group had observed pass¬

ing by during the wait for the landing. It
would not be the last time Martin would in¬
flate a mundane incident into a signal from
the cosmos. Nor would it be the last of the
unfulfilled prophecies.

In that same message on August 2,
Sananda warned that soon a tidal wave off
Fake Michigan would wash over Chicago and
cause enormous destruction. Subsequent
communications spoke of enormous geologi¬
cal upheaval that would break North America
in two, sink much of Europe under the ocean,
and raise Mu from its underwater grave.

Martin and the Faugheads reported these
revelations to the larger world in a seven-page
mimeographed document, “Open Fetter to
American Editors and Publishers,” sent out
on August 30. A handwritten addendum ap¬
pended at the last minute cited December 20
as the “date of evacuation,” in other words,
the final day on which human beings living in
the affected area could save themselves. A sec¬
ond mailing two weeks later concerned the
“terrific wave” that would rise from Fake
Michigan at dawn on December 21 and en¬
gulf Chicago.

Soon the group found itself featured in a
tongue-in-cheek newspaper story. The public¬
ity brought followers, curiosity-seekers, and
practical jokers to Mrs. Martin’s door. It also
brought her and her group to the attention of
the University of Minnesota’s Faboratory for
Research in Social Relations, which enlisted the
services of five psychologists, sociologists, and
graduate students. The volunteers were to ob¬
serve—as participants and self-identified be¬
lievers—a prophetic movement at work and to
see what happened when the anticipated events
did not occur. In due course, Feon Festinger,
Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, the
professors who had directed the experiment,
chronicled the episode in When Prophecy Fails.

Though Martin, Faughead, and the others
harbored ambivalent feelings about the public¬
ity and proselytization, it would have been im¬
possible to conceal what was going on. The
group now claimed followers not only in the
Chicago area but also in East Fansing and De-

Sister Thedra 231

troit. In East Lansing, Laughead led a church-
related Quest group and, moreover, had ties to
the Detroit saucer community, dominated by
contactees and mystics, including medium Rose
Phillips, who had her own cosmic sources.
When some of Martin’s followers asked Phillips
about the December 21 prophecy, those sources
responded ambiguously.

On the Earth plane, Dr. Laughead was fac¬
ing a serious professional and personal crisis
over his ever more visible advocacy of beliefs
that most people thought bizarre or even
laughable. On November 22, he was asked to
resign his position with the college health ser¬
vice effective December 1, though word of the
firing would be withheld for another three
weeks. College president John A. Elannah
later told the press that students had com¬
plained about Laughead’s “propagandizing”
them “on a peculiar set of beliefs of question¬
able validity” (“The End,” 1955). Effectively
cutting their ties to East Lansing, the Laugh-
eads moved into the Martin residence and
awaited the arrival of the flying saucers that
would save them and their companions at the
onset of the December 21 cataclysm.

On December 17, a Chicago newspaper
exposed the group’s strange beliefs and Laug¬
head’s loss of employment. Other papers
around the country, and soon afterward the
world, picked up the story, and the result was
blistering ridicule on an international scale.
The publicity also left the relentlessly gullible
group open to pranks that periodically sent its
members packing in preparation for meetings
with space people or saucer landings.

Though on the morning of the twentieth
the Guardians promised that they would
board a flying saucer just after midnight, no
spaceship appeared. Stunned, the group tried
to figure out what had happened. Finally,
someone suggested that the group’s positive
work had prevented the flood. Not long after¬
ward, a message from Sananda confirmed that
interpretation. When Laughead called re¬
porters and wire services to pass on the good
news, he triggered a fresh round of ridicule-
laced stories. Even worse, group members

who had given up jobs and cut ties with skep¬
tical family members faced uncertain futures.

Prank calls and visits over the next 24 days,
however, kept the group open to the prospect
of a landing. Martin also claimed that earth¬
quakes that had taken place in Italy and Cali¬
fornia validated her prophecy. By now she was
grasping at anything. A message on the
twenty-third directed everyone to stand in
front of the Martin house at 6 P.M. and sing
Christmas carols, at which time a saucer
would come down and its crew would engage
the group in personal conversation. The mes¬
sage further instructed the group to publicize
the new prophecy and to invite all interested
persons to come.

For Martin, the caroling episode marked a
turning point. It sparked a near riot and drew
law-enforcement personnel to the scene. Com¬
munity pressure forced the police to draw up a
warrant against Martin and Laughead, charg¬
ing them with disturbing the peace and con¬
tributing to the delinquency of minors. She
was also warned that she faced psychiatric ex¬
amination and possible institutionalization.

Early in January 1955, Dorothy Martin
slipped out of town. Under an assumed name,
she flew to Arizona. In her new residence she
found herself much closer to the hub of con-
tactee activity. Both Truman Bethurum and
George Elunt Williamson (a contactee, fringe
archaeologist, and alleged witness to Adamski’s
first Venusian encounter) lived in Arizona. The
Laugheads, now resettled in southern Califor¬
nia, dropped in from time to time.

Through Williamson’s channelings, the
Laugheads and Martin learned of the Brother¬
hood of the Seven Rays, a supernatural order
dating back to Lemurian times and headquar¬
tered in the present Lake Titicaca in Peru.
Guided by further prophecies of imminent
apocalypse channeled through both William¬
son and Martin, the two—along with a small
band of disciples—moved to Titicaca to estab¬
lish the Priority of All Saints in the remote
northern town Moyobamba. From Hemet,
California, the Laugheads kept the North
American faithful abreast of developments. A

232 Sky people

bulletin reported day-by-day activities there.
Each report was accompanied by a transcript
of channeled or automatically written mes¬
sages, often with apocalyptic overtones. Soon,
these messages said, cataclysmic changes
would bring flying saucers down from the
skies and Lemuria and Atlantis up from the
ocean bottom.

By the summer of 1957, however, nearly all
of the spiritual pilgrims were back in the
United States. The exception was Martin,
whom Sananda had directed to stay behind.

Living under the most primitive condi¬
tions, suffering from poverty and ill health,
Martin barely survived. She felt that her col¬
leagues had betrayed her. She spent a portion
of her meager income on postage for mailings
to North America, but no one seemed to lis¬
ten or care. Even so, the messages continued
to come at a furious pace. Now they included
dramatic visionary encounters with various
space people, angels, and religious figures.

Though expecting to spend the rest of her
life in the Andes, Martin was surprised to re¬
ceive instructions to return to the United
States in 1961. She moved to southern Cali¬
fornia and was there for nearly a year before
heading to the far northern part of the state
and Mount Shasta, long an attraction to
Americas mystically minded. Occult legend
held that a colony of Lemurians lived inside
or under the mountain. The Lemurians main¬
tained contacts with extraterrestrials who reg¬
ularly arrived in saucers.

Sananda and Sanat Kumara ordered Mar¬
tin to establish the Association of Sananda
and Sanat Kumara. Finding peace and stabil¬
ity at last, she took up residence in the Shasta
area and worked with a small but devoted
band of followers who carefully recorded and
circulated the messages she received daily.

By 1988, with Sedona, Arizona, now the
New Age center of North America, the space
people dictated yet another move. It was here,
on June 13, 1992, that Sister Thedra’s long,
strange trip ended. Just before her death
Sananda told her of his plans for her in the
next world. As her body failed, her hand

guided a pen one last time to write the final
message from her beloved cosmic friend: “It is
now come the time that ye come out of the
place wherein ye are. . . . Let it be, for many
shall greet thee with glad shouts!”

See Also: Adamski, George; Atlantis; Bethurum,
Truman; Contactees; Lemuria; Mount Shasta;
Orthon; Sananda; Williamson, George Hunt

Further Reading

Clark, Jerome, 1997. “The Odyssey of Sister The-
dra.” Syzygy 6, 2 (Summer/Fall): 203-219.

“The End of the World,” 1955. The Saucerian 3, 2
(Spring): 4-7, 55-60.

Festinger, Leon, Henry W Riecken, and Stanley
Schachter, 1956. When Prophecy Fails. Min¬
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Ibn Aharon, Y. N. [pseud. ofYonah Fortner], 1957.
“Diagnosis: A Case of Chronic Fright.” Saucer
News 4, 5 (August/September): 3-6.

Sky people

Brinsley le Poer Trench, author of a series of
books proposing esoteric theories about every¬
thing from space visitors to the Earths hidden
history, held that the “sky people”—called the
Elohim in the Old Testament—created Ani¬
mal or Adamic Man, otherwise known as the
present human race. The creation occurred via
what would now be called genetic engineer¬
ing, and it was done by a renegade band of
Elohim called the Jehovah. The Jehovah,
knowing that their experiment was an unau¬
thorized one, removed their creation to an ob¬
scure location—what the Bible calls the Gar¬
den of Eden—on Mars. In due course,
another extraterrestrial race, known as the Ser¬
pent people, learned of the Garden and visited
it, curious about experiments that had created
women. The Serpent people gave the hereto-
fore-innocent inhabitants of the Garden wis¬
dom and scientific knowledge, and they also
introduced them to sexual intercourse and re¬
production. Many of the Adamic Women
bore children sired by the Serpent race.

The Jehovah were furious when they found
out about the Serpent people’s interference,
but it was too late for them to continue their
domination of Adamic Man. The individual
Jehovah most responsible for the experiment,

Smith 233

Noah-I, was driven from Mars. With his cre¬
ations, he flew back to Earth in a spaceship
(Noah’s Ark) and populated the Earth.

According to Trench, all human conflict
stems from mankind’s dual nature. Only if we
achieve “total consciousness”—in which both
the superior Serpent heritage and the Animal
nature are integrated—can we claim our place
as wise, peaceful citizens of the galaxy.

Further Reading

Trench, Brinsley le Poer, 1960. The Sky People. Lon¬
don: Neville Spearman.

Smead’s Martians

A century ago pioneering psychical researcher
James Elyslop investigated a case in which an
American woman received psychic messages
from Mars. The Martians, however, were not
natives of the planet but deceased relatives
who were now living on the Red Planet.

The woman, whom Hyslop identifies only
as Mrs. Smead, was married to a clergyman.
All her life she had had psychic experiences,
many of them involving spirit communica¬
tions through automatic writing. Then in
1895 a different set of messages started to
come through. They were from her three dead
children and her deceased brother-in-law.
One of the daughters, Maude, provided a de¬
scription of her new home, which she said was
crisscrossed with canals, reflecting a belief to
that effect (since conclusively debunked)
promulgated by astronomer Percival Lowell.

The communications ceased, then resumed
again five years later as if there had been no
interruption. Invited to assess them, Hyslop
deduced that they came out of a “secondary
personality”—what now would be called the
unconscious mind—of Mrs. Smead’s. He
wrote,

We find in such cases evidence that we need
not attribute fraud to the normal conscious¬
ness, and we discover automatic processes of
mentation that may be equally acquitted of
fraudulent intent; while we are also free from
the obligation to accept the phenomena at

their assumed value. Their most extraordinary
characteristic is the extent to which they imi¬
tate the organizing principle intelligence of a
normal mind, and the perfection of their im¬
personation of spirits, always betraying their
limitations, however, just at the point where we
have the right to expect veridical testimony to
their claims. (Hyslop, 1908)

See Also: Aliens and the dead; Allingham’s Martian;
Aurora Martian; Brown’s Martians; Dentons’s
Martians and Venusians; Hopkins’s Martians;
Khauga; Martian bees; Mince-Pie Martians;
Monka; Muller’s Martians; Shaw’s Martians;
Wilcox’s Martians
Further Reading

Hyslop, James H., 1908. Psychical Research and the
Resurrection. London: Fisher Unwin.

Smith

During a wave of sightings of mysterious,
never-explained “airships” (UFOs in modern
terminology) in the spring of 1897, a Rock¬
land, Texas, man named John Barclay claimed
an encounter with a close-lipped pilot who
gave only his last name. The Houston Daily
Post of April 25 reported the incident.

Around 11 P.M., as Barclay told the story,
he heard his dogs barking frantically. Glanc¬
ing out his window, he was startled to see an
oblong-shaped object with wings circling just
above his pasture. Moments later the ship
landed. Winchester rifle in hand, the witness
stepped outside where he spotted a stranger.
The stranger identified himself only as
“Smith.” He would not allow Barclay to get
closer to the ship. “We cannot allow you to
get any closer, but do as we request [and] your
kindness will be appreciated,” Smith said,
“and we will call on you some future day and
reciprocate your kindness by taking you on a
trip.” He handed Barclay ten dollars and
asked him to purchase lubricating oil, two
cold chisels, and bluestone from a nearby saw
mill and railroad depot. On his return Barclay
asked the aeronaut where he was from. “Any¬
where,” Smith replied, then added, “We will
be in Greece day after tomorrow.” He entered
the ship and was gone.

234 Source

Since conventional aviation history attests
that no such ships were flying over America in
the late nineteenth century, some UFO writ¬
ers have theorized that the so-called aeronauts
were really extraterrestrials or supernatural en¬
tities in disguise. A more likely explanation is
that the stories were hoaxes of the sort that
filled many period newspapers.

See Also: Aurora Martian; Lethbridge’s aeronauts;
Michigan giant; Ultraterrestrials; Wilson

Further Reading

Chariton, Wallace O., 1991. The Great Texas Airship
Mystery. Plano, TX: Wordware Publishing.

Cohen, Daniel, 1981. The Great Airship Mystery: A
UFO of the 1890s. New York: Dodd, Mead and
Company.

Source

The Source, a sort of universal mind, was
channeled through Paul Solomon. Solomons
channeling began in 1972 when he was living
in Atlanta and going through acute personal
distress in the wake of a failed marriage. In an
effort to deal with his emotional problems,
Solomon underwent hypnosis. Under hypno¬
sis a powerful voice spoke through his mouth,
warning, “You have not attained sufficient
growth or spiritual awareness to understand
contact with these records!” Bewildered,
Solomon and hypnotist Harry Snipes III de¬
cided to explore the mystery in a second ses¬
sion. From there the Source, as Solomon and
Snipes called it, began instructing Solomon
on how to communicate with it and how to
pass on its wisdom to others.

The Source taught a spiritual philosophy
that it called “Inner Light Consciousness,”
thus the name of the organization Solomon
soon formed: Fellowship of the Inner Light.
In 1974, Solomon and his followers relocated
to Virginia Beach, Virginia, where Edgar
Cayce, to whom Solomon would be com¬
pared, had lived and had pursued his spiritual
work. Like Cayce’s, Solomon’s readings en¬
compassed Atlantis, reincarnation, healing,
prophecies, and more.

The Source claimed to be a greater power
than the spirit or channeling entities that were

a good part of the focus of the New Age
movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Its mis¬
sion was to provide a way for seekers to touch
the Holy Spirit within them and, thereafter,
to let it guide them. Before his death in 1994,
Solomon had conducted thousands of read¬
ings, many preserved on tape and sold by as¬
sociates who seek to keep his and the Source’s
memory alive.

Further Reading

Beidler, William, 1977. “Paul Solomon . . . Another
Cayce?” Fate 30, 2 (February): 56-61.

A Healing Consciousness, 1978. Virginia Beach, VA:
Master’s Press.

Spiritual Unfoldment and Psychic Development
through Inner Light Consciousness, 1973. Atlanta,
GA: Fellowship of the Inner Light.

Wheeler, W. Alexander, 1994. The Prophetic Revela -
tions of Paul Solomon: Earthivard toivard a Heav -
enly Light. New York: Samuel B. Weiser.

SPECTRA

Under hypnosis on November 30, 1971, Is¬
raeli psychic Uri Geller “recalled” an incident
that occurred when he was three years old.
Geller encountered a dazzling light from
which a voice emanated. The voice said it was
his “programmer.” Over the years, Geller re¬
ceived many more messages from this intelli¬
gence, which called itself SPECTRA and,
sometimes, Hoova. It gave Geller his reported
paranormal talents. In the opinion of Geller’s
hypnotist and then-collaborator, physician/
parapsychologist Andrija Puharich, Geller
may have been a prophet “specifically created
to serve as an intermediary between a ‘divine’
intelligence and man” (Puharich, 1974).

SPECTRA claimed it was a supercomputer
into which the minds and bodies of a wide va¬
riety of intelligent beings had been trans¬
ferred. These beings communicated with
Geller through automatic writing, states of al¬
tered consciousness, and voices on blank
tapes. SPECTRA’s first appearance on Earth
was twenty thousand years ago, when its
spaceship landed in the present nation of Is¬
rael. Since then SPECTRA has seen the Jews

Springheel Jack 235

Uri Geller, the psychic performer, ca. 1978 (Hulton-
Deutsch Collection/Corbis)

as its special people and has tried to protect
them. In the meantime, other beings from
other planets and dimensions unrelated to
SPECTRA have visited Earth. The beings be¬
hind SPECTRA have said that they live in the
future. They are short and generally human in
appearance, looking like—in their words—
“certain exotic types of Japanese.”

This fantastic tale figured largely in
Puharich’s Uri (1974), but Geller himself dis¬
tanced himself from it. His own autobiogra¬
phy, published a year after Puharich’s book,
does not even mention SPECTRA, though it
does recount his childhood close encounter
with a “silvery mass of light” that seemed to
make time stand still. As the light approached
him, the youthful Geller felt a sharp pain in
his forehead, then lost consciousness for an
undetermined period of time.

Further Reading

Geller, Uri, 1975. Uri Geller: My Story. New York:
Praeger Publishers.

Puharich, Andrija, 1974. Uri: A Journal of the Mys
tery of Uri Geller. Garden City, NY: Anchor
Press/Doubleday and Company.

Springheel Jack

Springheel Jack (sometimes referred to as
Spring Heeled Jack) is a figure out of Victo¬
rian folklore, a mysterious man or being of vi¬
olent disposition and a strange ability to jump
great distances. Stories about him were first
told in suburban London in September 1837.
Some victims described him as a man wearing
a flowing cloak and glaring at his victims with
glowing eyes. It was claimed that he shot
flames from his mouth. Others said he dis¬
guised himself as a white bull or bear, while at
least one witness claimed he wore “polished
steel armor, with red shoes” (“Credulity,”
1838). Some reports suggested that the at¬
tacker was not acting alone. Many of the at¬
tacks were on women and were seemingly sex¬
ual in nature (he ripped their clothes), though
apparently they did not involve actual rape.
London police, who took the reports seri¬
ously, investigated them but made no arrests.
Popular speculation pointed to Henry Mar¬
quis of Waterford, a man noted for reckless¬
ness, drunkenness, and other behavioral ex¬
cesses, but no clear or convincing evidence
backed up the suspicions. Superstitious peo¬
ple held that Springheel Jack was a ghost, and
that belief took root in folklore.

Sporadic sightings of a mysterious leaping
figure occurred in various places in England
into the twentieth century. In 1877, many
residents of Caistor, Norfolk, saw someone
dressed in sheepskin (reminiscent of earlier re¬
ports of Jack’s cladding himself in animal
skin) jumping from roof to roof, and the same
or a similar individual was widely observed in
Lincolnshire. On one occasion, when a mob
chased him, he leaped over walls and roofs. In
1904, in Liverpool’s Everton district, residents
saw a man dressed in a cloak and black boots

236 Sprinkle, Ronald Leo

executing high leaps, on one occasion al¬
legedly springing from the ground to a
rooftop twenty-five feet high.

Though Springheel Jack legends are not a
part of American folklore, figures very much
like him appear in a few curious episodes. In
1938, a century after the London reports,
people in and around Provincetown, Massa¬
chusetts, claimed encounters with a leaping
man with fierce-looking eyes and pointed
ears. They said he stunned his victims with a
blue flame emanating from his mouth. Com¬
parable stories were told in Baltimore in the
summer of 1951. On June 18, 1953, three
witnesses in a Houston neighborhood al¬
legedly sighted a leaping, black-clad figure in
a cloak and saw a rocket-shaped UFO zoom
away moments after the beings disappear¬
ance. At least two other cases link leaping,
Jacklike figures to UFOs, one in Gallipolis,
Ohio, in the early 1960s, another at Washing¬
ton’s Yakima Indian Reservation in December
1975.

The first suggestion that Jack may have
been an extraterrestrial appeared in the
March 6, 1954, issue of the British magazine
Everybody’s. The next year, in a book on Liver¬
pool history and lore, Richard Whittington-
Egan remarked that such a theory “would ac¬
count for his astounding leaping proclivities
because he would be adapted to the require¬
ments of life on a greater-gravity planet. Like¬
wise, differences in physical constitution
would probably enable him to live longer on
earth and might well explain the flame-like
emanations from his mouth” (Whittington-
Egan, 1955).

On the other hand, in an extended survey
of all available literature on the legend, British
writer Mike Dash rejected any notion that the
various reports over a century and a half were
connected except as folklore. In Dash’s view,
“Springheel Jack” is a catchall name denoting
unrelated pranksters, hoaxers, and criminals.
Still, it is hard to deny that intriguing ques¬
tions remain, and Springheel Jack—whatever
he or it may or may not be—constitutes an
appealingly romantic mystery.

Further Reading

“Credulity—The Ghost Story,” 1838. London Times
(January 10).

Dash, Mike, 1996. “Spring-Heeled Jack: To Victo¬
rian Bugaboo from Suburban Ghost.” In Steve
Moore, ed. Fortean Studies, Volume 3, 7-125.
London: John Brown Publishing.

Haining, Peter, 1977. The Legend and Bizarre Crimes
of Spring Lieeled Jack. London: Frederick Muller.

Whittington-Egan, Richard, 1955. Liverpool Colon -
nade. Liverpool, England: Son and Nephew.

Sprinkle, Ronald Leo (1930- )

R. Leo Sprinkle is a psychologist in private
practice in Laramie, Wyoming. Prior to that,
as a member of the counseling department of
the University of Wyoming, he became
known as one of a handful of mental-health
professionals with a sympathetic interest in
the UFO phenomenon. He was the first to
study the psychological make-up of abductees
and contactees. In 1968, as a psychological
consultant for the U.S. Air Force-sponsored
University of Colorado UFO Project, he hyp¬
notized a Nebraska police officer who re¬
ported a puzzling period of missing time dur¬
ing a close encounter. Sprinkle’s principal
interest, however, was in persons who be¬
lieved themselves to be in psychic and other
contact with friendly space people, whom
Sprinkle called “UFOlk.” In 1980, he and the
Institute for UFO Contactee Studies held the
first Rocky Mountain Conference on UFO
Investigation. From then until 1996 he
would direct the meetings, which brought
together contactees, their followers, and in¬
terested observers.

Sprinkle’s interest was, and is, more than
academic. He believes himself to be a con¬
tactee and maintains an active interest in rein¬
carnation and other metaphysical questions.
UFOs and their occupants are here, he be¬
lieves, “so that human development moves
from Planetary Persons to Cosmic Citizens”
(Sprinkle, 1995).

See Also: Abductions by UFOs; Contactees

Further Reading

Parnell, June O., and R. Leo Sprinkle, 1990. “Per¬
sonality Characteristics of Persons Who Claim

Star People 237

UFO Experiences.” Journal of UFO Studies 2
(new series): 45-58.

Sprinkle, R. Leo, 1999. Sold Samples: Personal Explo -
rations in Reincarnation and UFO Experiences.
Columbus, NC: Granite Publishing.

-, 1969. “Personal and Scientific Attitudes: A

Study of Persons Interested in UFO Reports.” In
Charles Bowen, ed. Beyond Condon: Flying Saucer
Review Special Issue No. 2, June, 6-10. London:
Flying Saucer Review.

-, 1976. “Flypnotic and Psychic Aspects of

UFO Research.” In Proceedings of the 1976
CUFOS Conference, 251-258. Evanston, IL:
Center for UFO Studies.

-, 1995. “The Significance of UFO Experi¬
ences.” In David Pursglove, ed. Zen in the Art of
Close Encounters, 164-165. Berkeley, CA: New
Being Project.

Sprinkle, R. Leo, ed., 1980. Proceedings of the Rocky
Mountain Conference on UFO Investigation.
Laramie, WY: School of Extended Studies.

Star People

“Star People” is a notion made popular in the
late 1970s and early 1980s. Brad Steiger, a
prolific writer on paranormal, occult, and ufo¬
logical subjects, introduced the phrase in a
1976 book. He writes that the “majority of
Amerindian Medicine People” believe that
Star People—individuals who many lifetimes
ago came to Earth with a mission from their
home worlds—are “becoming active at this
time in an effort to aid mankind [in surviv¬
ing] a coming Great Purification of the
planet” (Steiger, 1976). In the course of his
investigation of channeling and channelers, he
says, he became aware of women he calls “Star
Maidens.” Such women shared certain physi¬
cal characteristics and had “memories” of ar¬
riving on Earth twenty thousand years ago in
a starship. Before long Steiger became con¬
vinced that just as many men—including
himself—had similar claims to extraterrestrial
origin.

Steiger eventually married a woman he be¬
lieved to be a Star Maiden, Francie Paschal.
Paschal reported a lifetime of otherworldly ex¬
periences, beginning with childhood visions
in which an apparitional spaceman, looking
like a “Hollywood-type Viking prince,” told

her, “Like unto another Christ child you will
be.” He said she was from a “planet. . . like
unto Venus” (Steiger, 1976). She and Steiger
believed they had shared previous lives. As
part of what they believed to be their mission,
the couple moved from upstate New York to
Scottsdale, Arizona.

An article on their beliefs concerning Star
People in the May 1, 1979, issue of the Na -
tional Enquirer brought them a flood of let¬
ters and telephone calls. It turned out that
other persons suspected that they also were
space people put in place to help the human
race through coming cataclysms and changes.
Many said they had heard a disembodied
voice tell them, “Now is the time,” shortly
before they read the Enquirer piece. The
Steigers went on to release books in the “Star
People Series,” three originals and two
reprints of earlier Brad Steiger titles. The
originals were based in considerable part on
Francie’s channelings.

According to these messages, the Starseeds
are the true Star People. As direct descendants
of extraterrestrials, they have both alien and
human genes. The Star Helpers are descen¬
dants of the extraterrestrials’ original disciples.
Later, from further channeling, hypnotic re¬
gression, and testimony from others, the
Steigers concluded that three different types
of space ancestors could be discerned: Refu¬
gees who crash-landed on this planet thou¬
sands of years ago, after escaping from turmoil
and destruction on their home planet; Utopi¬
ans, benign aliens who colonized other worlds
to give them perfect societies; and Energy
Essences, nonphysical entities who drift
through space, drop in on planets, and occa¬
sionally occupy a host body.

In The Star People (1981), the Steigers re¬
ported that a number of their correspondents
believed they had insights into the immediate
future. They foresaw worldwide famine in
1982, a pole shift between 1982 and 1984,
World War III no later than 1985, and Ar¬
mageddon around 1990. Somewhere in the
middle of this, space people would land and
announce their presence.

238 Stellar Community of Enlightened Ecosystems

By the mid-1980s, the Steigers had di¬
vorced, and only Francie maintained enthusi¬
asm for the Star People notion. Her death, a
few years later, effectively ended what re¬
mained of the movement.

See Also: Channeling

Further Reading

Steiger, Brad, 1973. Revelation: The Divine Fire. En¬
glewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

-, 1976. Gods of Aquarius: UFOs and the

Transformation of Man. New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich.

-, 1983. The Seed. New York: Berkley Books.

Steiger, Brad, and Francie Steiger, 1981. The Star
People. New York: Berkley Books.

Steiger, Francie, 1982. Reflections from an Angel’s Eye.
New York: Berkley Books.

Stellar Community of
Enlightened Ecosystems

Sometime in the 1980s, Jerry Doran of Wilm¬
ington, California, claims to have had an out-of-
body experience. He ascended into space where
he encountered “live blue skinned dolphins
floating inside [a] spaceship.” Through telepathy
the dolphins informed him that they were asso¬
ciated with the Stellar Community of Enlight¬
ened Ecosystems. The community sought to
guide human evolution toward attainment of a
“Group Mind which includes the animals and
plants of Earth, the Earth itself, the Sun and
similar enlightened star systems throughout the
Cosmos” (Melton, Clark, and Kelly, 1990).

Further Reading

Melton, J. Gordon, Jerome Clark, and Aidan A.
Kelly, 1990. New Age Encyclopedia. Detroit, MI:
Gale Research.

Strieber, Whitley (1945- )

Whitley Strieber began his career as a success¬
ful writer of horror and science-fiction novels
but has since become better known as a chron¬
icler of his own paranormal and otherworldly
experiences, including abductions by UFOs.

Born to a prominent San Antonio family, he
attended the University of Texas, then moved
to New York to begin a writing career. On the
evening of December 26, 1985, he experienced

Whitley Strieber (Dennis Stacy/Fortean Picture Library)

a number of peculiar encounters of which he
did not have full conscious recall. A subsequent
hypnosis session led him to believe that he had
encountered aliens who inserted a needle into
his brain. Strieber sought out the well-known
abduction investigator Budd Hopkins, who
lived not far from him though the two had not
met till then. Hopkins introduced him to psy¬
chiatrist Donald F. Klein, who subjected
Strieber to psychological tests and pronounced
him normal. Strieber and Hopkins soon parted
company on bad terms around the time
Strieber published a best-selling account of his
abduction experiences, Communion (1987).

Communion sparked something of an up¬
roar, with some critics—most vocally Thomas
M. Disch in The Nation —accusing Strieber of
having written a science-fiction novel that he
was passing off as fact. Strieber also had his
defenders, who argued that he had too much
to lose to engage in that sort of literary fraud.
A follow-up book, Transformation (1988), re¬
counted further experiences, and it, in turn,
was followed by more books recounting ever

Sunar and Treena 239

more fantastic interactions with “the visitors,”
as Strieber calls them. By the time he pub¬
lished Secret School in 1996, he was claiming
that aliens had been interacting with him all
of his life, beginning in his childhood when
the visitors instructed him and other San An¬
tonio children on their missions as adults.

See Also: Abductions by UFOs; Extraterrestrials
among us; Hopkins, Budd

Further Reading

Conroy, Ed, 1989 . Report on “Communion”: An Inde -
pendent Investigation of and Commentary on Whit -
ley Strieber’s “Communion. ” New York: William
Morrow and Company.

Strieber, Whitley, 1987. Communion: A True Story.
Beach Tree/William Morrow.

-, 1988. Transformation: The Breakthrough.

New York: William Morrow and Company.

-, 1995. Breakthrough: The Next Step. New

York: HarperCollins Publishers.

-, 1996. The Secret School: Preparation for

Contact. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.

Strieber, Whitley, and Anne Strieber, eds., 1997. The
Communion Letters. New York: HarperPrism.

Swords, Michael D„ 1987. “Communion: A Reader’s
Guide.” MUFON UFO Journal 229 (May): 3-6.

Sunar and Treena

Dean Anderson of Egg Harbor, Wisconsin,
was atop a riding lawn mower at a golf course

when a flying saucer landed. It was 4:15 A.M.,
August 22, 1976. A door opened, and two be¬
ings, a man and a woman, floated out on a
beam of light. As they stepped toward Ander¬
son, the saucer vanished. They shook Ander¬
son’s hand, and the man said, “We come in
peace. I am Sunar, from Jupiter. This is
Treena. She comes from Saturn” (Bartho¬
lomew and Howard, 1998). Sunar, who had
copper skin, said he was more than two hun¬
dred years old. The lightly tanned Treena, clad
in a one-piece, skin-tight, green, glistening,
metallic suit, looked, Anderson thought, like
Elizabeth Taylor.

The space people told him that they had
come to Earth to gather specimens. Before
they left, they handed him an envelope with
instructions not to open it for five Earth
days. After waiting for the designated period,
Anderson found a golden amulet inside. On
one side there was a bird resembling a dove.
On the other, a message read, “Peace and
friendship forever, Treena and Sunar,” with
depictions of Saturn and Jupiter beside the
names.

Further Reading

Bartholomew, Robert E„ and George S. Howard,
1998. UFOs and Alien Contact: Two Centuries of
Mystery. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Tabar

On the night of December 10, 1979, a Rhode
Island woman, Elaine Kaiser, saw a white light
and fell unconscious. Subsequent probing
through hypnosis elicited the “memory” of
floating in a beam into a room aboard a space¬
craft. There she encountered a giant being in a
dark metallic suit. By telepathy, the being told
her his name was Tabar, and he was from 2.4
million light years away. She was laid on a
table and connected by instruments to a man
who lay on another. She did not recognize the
man. The procedure seemed to be something
like a blood transfusion. At first it was painful,
but Tabar waved a hand in front of her face,
and the discomfort ceased.

Several months later Kaiser saw the man in
an audience. He did not act as if he recog¬
nized her, and she did not approach him.

Further Reading

“Alien Visitors?” 1982. Oakland [Michigan] Press
(August 22).

Tawa

Tawa, a Blackfoot Indian and a friend of
Jesus in a previous incarnation, emerged in a
Ouija board session in suburban Chicago on
August 22, 1968. Previous to this, Candy
Fletcher had been pursuing spiritual ques¬

tions by reading metaphysical books and ex¬
ploring altered states of consciousness. But it
was through her husband, Rey, that Tawa
spoke. Under hypnosis, Rey Fletcher chan¬
neled Tawa’s teachings until late 1970 when
he turned his attention to more prosaic con¬
cerns. His wife, however, transcribed the
teachings and began work on a book based
on them. She also founded the Circle of
Power Foundation. In 1984 the Fletchers
moved to Victor, Montana, to devote full
time to their spiritual concerns.

According to Tawa, Jesus was born again
into the world in 1962, but the individual
had yet to realize that he was the Messiah.
Soon, however, he would come to that knowl¬
edge and reveal himself to the world, which
this time would accept his mission. But before
that happened, the anti-Christ would exert
malign influences and power before Jesus van¬
quished him.

See Also: Channeling

Further Reading

Fletcher, C. R., 1984. Spirit in His Mind. Victor,
MT: Circle of Power Foundation.

Tecu

Tecu (pronounced Tey-coo) is an entity who
channeled through a young California

241

242 Thee Elohim

woman, Sanaya Roman. Roman first heard
from him when she and a friend were vaca¬
tioning in Kauai, Hawaii. At that time, he
dictated a book-length manuscript on how to
heal psychically and how to use the universal
laws of energy to one’s benefit. According to
Roman, “Tecu identified himself as a Lord of
Time from the portals of the world of essence
where all matter is created” (Roman and
Packer, 1987).

He came to her a second time on another
Hawaiian trip. Then she learned that he came
from a universe of a different frequency, thus
making communication difficult and infre¬
quent. In that universe, energy is “symmetri¬
cal.” A jolly being, he took in good humor the
difficulties he encountered trying to walk in
Romans body. Because in his realm energy is
absorbed whenever it is necessary, he was at
first perplexed by the experience of eating
food. “Eating is at the root of your problems,”
he remarked wryly. “First you have to have
food. Then you need dishes. Then you have to
build a house to contain the dishes. Then you
have to go to work to pay for the house. All
because you have to eat!”

Tecu came back on several occasions to dis¬
cuss the coming Earth changes and to encour¬
age Roman to continue her project of teach¬
ing others how to channel.

See Also: Channeling

Further Reading

Roman, Sanaya, and Duane Packer, 1987. Opening
to Channel: How to Connect with Your Guide.
Tiburon, CA: H. J. Kramer.

Thee Elohim

In April 1971, a Milwaukee woman, June
Young, experienced a vision in which white
and black people linked hands. All were wear¬
ing black robes with large white rosaries
around their necks. Soon she began receiving
messages from Archangel Michael. “He told
me to start a class dealing with the higher laws
of God,” she said. “He gave me full instruc¬
tions. The lessons were brought and taught by
Michael and his Angels. Michael is the head

of our class as well as our protector.” She came
to understand that her original vision was of
the group she would form, the Arising Sun’s
Interplanetary Class of Thee Elohim.

She explained to writer Brad Steiger that
Thee Elohim are the seven spirits of God:
Chamuel, Gabriel, Raphael, Zadkiel, Mi¬
chael, Jophiel, and Uriel. “They stand before
God and co-create with Him,” she explained.
“They manage and direct all forms that exist.”

In 1972 Jophiel, “the angel of intuitive
light,” told her that because she had man¬
aged to overcome “your desires of the flesh,”
he and his colleagues were giving her back
the name she had held in her previous incar¬
nation as a Venusian: Bright Star. Ever after
she went by that name, working at her mis¬
sion to “bring the material and spiritual
kingdoms together.” According to her space
friends, the Earth would go through devas¬
tating physical and social upheaval in the last
years of the twentieth century, but with the
help of the space people and their terrestrial
associates, the Earth’s people will eventually
enter a new age of peace, harmony, and spiri¬
tual wisdom.

Further Reading

Steiger, Brad, 1976. Gods of Aquarius: UFOs and the
Transformation of Man. New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich.

Thompson’s Venusians

Samuel Eaton Thompson’s story is as strange
as any from the UFO age. Before the word
“contactees” had been invented, Thompson,
an elderly, poorly educated, retired railroad
worker, claimed to have spent two days in the
company of naked, Edenic Venusians and,
moreover, seemed to actually believe his own
story was true.

Thompson’s strange odyssey began on
March 28, 1950, as he was driving between
Morton and Mineral, Washington, on his way
home from a visit to relatives in Markham. As
he passed through a wooded area, he decided
to stop and take a break. He took a stroll

Thompsons Venusians 243

down an old logging trail that took him
deeper into the forest. As he entered a
clearing, he saw a hovering UFO that, he later
related to a local newspaper reporter, “ap¬
peared to be made of a glowing, sun-colored
substance similar to plastic and was shaped
like two saucers fused together. I judged it was
about eighty feet horizontally and thirty-two
vertically” (“Centralian Tells,” 1950). Equally
peculiar was the sight of tanned, fine-featured,
naked children playing on steps that led from
the saucer to the ground.

Excited, Thompson approached the craft,
feeling a mild heat emanating from it—the
cause, he would learn subsequently, of its oc¬
cupants’ tanned skins. As he came nearer, his
presence brought the adults—beautiful and
nude, with dark blond hair—to the door.
They seemed frightened of him. He told them
he meant no harm, and they relaxed. After
asking him in clumsy English to remove his
shoes and socks, they invited him inside,
where he spent the next forty hours.

He learned that they were from Venus.
The ship was also their home. It carried ten
men and ten women as well as twenty-five
children between six and fifteen years old. In¬
terviewed a few days later by private pilot and
well-known UFO witness Kenneth Arnold,
Thompson said the Venusians were friendly
and cheerful but curiously naive. He com¬
pared them to animals, meaning that instinct
rather than intellect governs their activities.
They knew nothing of the technology that
powered their ship; they knew which buttons
to push and levers to pull to get where they
wanted to go, and that was it. They had no
sense of time and no curiosity, and because of
their eating habits—they were vegetarians
and stayed away from cooked foods—they
never got sick and lived long lives. Their veg¬
etables were like those found on Earth, and
Thompson ate some while on the “spaceship”
(the word the Venusians used for their craft).
He pronounced the food “just great.”

Venusians fear earthlings because human
aircraft had shot down some of their space¬
ships. Earth is considered a bad planet, but

Mars is even worse. There are twelve inhab¬
ited planets in the solar system. Each resident
is born under the sign of the planet on which
he or she is born, except for Earth, whose
problems stem from the fact that each person
is born under a different sign. Venusians and
earthlings long ago were very close, sharing
“the first religion ever known,” but the people
of Earth eventually became corrupt, and a
curse was cast upon their planet. Venusians
and other space people are now reincarnating
on Earth; their goal is to reform the earthlings
and prepare them for Christ’s Second Coming
in A.D. 10,000.

After sleeping overnight in a chair in one of
the ship’s bedrooms, Thompson asked for per¬
mission to go home and pick up a camera.
They did not know what a camera was. When
he explained, they said he could go but asked
him not to bring anyone else along. The pho¬
tographic experiment came to nil. It was “just
like trying to take a picture of the sun,” he
told Arnold. “It has a glow to it. That film was
just blank. I wanted to get some of them right
onto the ground to take some pictures of
them, but they wouldn’t come out” (Clark,
1981).

The Venusians left on March 30, caution¬
ing Thompson to keep certain information to
himself. If he ever saw them again, no one ever
knew. For many years his story was little
known, with a brief newspaper account the
only record of it. In 1980, Arnold gave a tape
of his early April 1950 interview with Thomp¬
son to Fate magazine, and an article largely
based on it appeared in the January 1981
issue. Arnold remarked on Thompson’s igno¬
rance and lack of imagination, and he was
convinced that Thompson believed his story,
its outlandish, even absurd, qualities notwith¬
standing. Arnold speculated that he had un¬
dergone some sort of “psychic” experience.

See Also: Adamski, George; Contactees; Hopkins’s
Martians

Further Reading

Arnold, Kenneth, 1980. “How It All Began.” In
Curtis G. Fuller, ed. Proceedings of the First Inter -
national UFO Congress, 17-29. New York:
Warner Books.

244 Tibus

“Centralian Tells Strange Tale of Visiting Venus
Space Ship in Eastern Lewis County,” 1950. Cen -
tralia [Washington] Daily Chronicle (April 1).
Clark, Jerome, 1981. “The Coming of the Venu-
sians.” Fate 34, 1 (January): 49-55.

Tibus

Tibus channels through Diane Tessman, a
channeling contactee now living in Iowa.
Tibus, a member of rhe Ashtar Command and
the Free Federation of Planets, has visited the
Earth thousands of times. Under hypnosis with
psychologist/ufologist R. Leo Sprinkle, Tess¬
man recounted several childhood “memories”
of encountering Tibus aboard a mother ship.
Fie was in the company of two humanoids, one
of whom was insectlike in appearance. The hu¬
manoids performed medical experiments on
her. One experiment, which occurred when she
was three years old, left a surgical scar between
her nose and upper lip. Tessman believes that
the space people were seeking to implant a
replica ofTibus’s soul inside her.

See Also: Ashtar; Channeling; Contactees; Sprinkle,
Ronald Leo
Further Reading

Montgomery, Ruth, 1985. Aliens among Us. New
York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

Time travelers

According to Bruce Goldberg, a California
physician and a prolific writer on occult and
metaphysical subjects, visitors from the future
are here. He claims to have met several
“chrononauts,” as he calls them. They are
here, he says, to help us in our spiritual evolu¬
tion, and they, not extraterrestrials, are the
agents responsible for UFO abductions.

Time travel was, or will be, invented in the
year 3050. The inventor, Taatos, was the god
Hermes thousands of years ago, in another
lifetime. Before Taatos traveled back to our
time to talk with Dr. Goldberg, however, he
helped send holographic images into our pres¬
ent reality. Goldberg writes that the chrono¬
nauts “have mastered hyperspace travel be¬
tween dimension [s], and can move through

walls and solid objects. By existing in the fifth
dimension, they can observe us and remain in¬
visible. Genetic manipulation of our chromo¬
somes is a routine procedure for them. They
have greatly speeded up our rate of evolution.”

While traveling in an out-of-body state
through the fifth dimension, Goldberg en¬
countered a thirty-sixth-century man who
called himself Traksa. Traksa told him that
many chrononauts are living quiedy among
humans, keeping out of the public eye and
even spending much of their time in a literally
invisible state. Traksa eventually acknowledged
to Goldberg that one purpose of his visit was
to introduce Goldberg to Art Bell, then host of
a nationwide radio show catering to enthusi¬
asts of the esoteric. Goldberg then realized that
spelled backwards, Traksa’s name was “ASK
ART.” Afterward Goldberg appeared at least
nine times on Bell’s popular program.

He also met Muat, Traksa’s supervisor from
the fortieth century. In earlier lifetimes, he
played big roles in both Atlantis and Lemuria.
Nirev (thirty-first century) helped with the
nineteenth century’s industrial revolution,
and Alsinoma (thirty-fourth century) tutored
Leonardo da Vinci. Chat Noy (fiftieth cen¬
tury) is or will be one of the great pioneers of
time travel.

“Chrononauts are spiritual people,” Gold¬
berg writes. “They follow us from lifetime to
lifetime, tracing our souls back to previous
lives and monitoring our spiritual unfolding.
Their ultimate purpose is to facilitate the per¬
fection of the human soul to allow for ascen¬
sion and the end of the karmic cycle. There
are also future problems—wars, pollution, in¬
fertility—in this and parallel universes that
they are trying to avert by assisting us now in
our spiritual progress” (Goldberg, n.d.).

Marc Davenport theorizes that UFOs are
visitors from the future. In his view, “These
time machines are peopled by a complex mix¬
ture of human beings, evolved forms of hu¬
manoid beings, genetically engineered life
forms, androids, robots and/or alien life
forms. These occupants make use of advanced
technology based on principles that will be

Tulpa 245

discovered at some point in our near future to
produce fields around their craft that warp
space-time. By manipulating those fields, they
are able to traverse what we think of as space
and time as well” (Davenport, 1992). Daven¬
port, however, does not claim to have seen
any of these time travelers himself.

See Also: Abductions by UFOs; Atlantis; Lemuria

Further Reading

Davenport, Marc, 1992. Visitors from Time: The Se -
cret of the UFOs. Tigard, OR: Wild Flower Press.

Goldberg, Bruce, n.d. “Time Travelers I Have Met.”
http://www.drbrucegoldberg.com/TimeTravel-
ers2.htm.

Tin-can aliens

Four miles east of Long Prairie, Minnesota, at
7:40 P.M. on October 23, 1965, a young radio
announcer named James Townsend was
rounding a curve when suddenly he saw some¬
thing in the road and slammed on his brakes.
It was a rocket-shaped UFO resting on three
fins. The car skidded to a halt only twenty feet
from the device, which stood thirty to forty
feet tall and was ten feet in diameter.

In a circle of light beneath the UFO,
Townsend observed three objects or entities
that looked like beer cans on tripod legs and
with three matchstick arms. Even though they
had no eyes, he was certain that they were
staring at him. When he stepped out of his
car, they came toward him. After what seemed
an eternity, they scooted under the ship and
disappeared into the light circle. The UFO
shot off with an ear-splitting roar.

His outlandish story notwithstanding, law-
enforcement officers and civilian investigators
believed that Townsend, a devoutly religious
man, was not perpetrating a hoax.

See Also: Close encounters of the third kind

Further Reading

Jansen, Clare John, 1966. “Little Tin Men in Min¬
nesota.” Fate 19, 2 (February): 36-40.

Tree-stump aliens

One of the most bizarre close encounters of
the third kind ever took place on the evening

of April 5, 1966, in Newport, Oregon, during
a nationwide UFO wave. Though such re¬
ports overwhelmingly describe human or hu¬
manoid entities, two teenaged girls claimed to
have seen aliens that looked like tree stumps.

As they told the story, they were walking to
the house of one of them—Kathy Reeves—
when they sensed that someone was following
them. At a turn in the road, they looked be¬
hind them to see something like a “flashlight
with a cover over the end.” Assuming it was a
prankster trying to scare them, they threw
rocks toward the light. But when they did so,
other, bigger lights suddenly switched on.
Frightened, the girls started running. Their
dash home was interrupted, however, by a
bizarre sight: three shapes moving across a
pasture apparently heading toward the lights.

They looked, Kathy Reeves later said, like
“three little tree stumps” walking on legs that
resembled a tree trunk’s tap roots. They had
no heads or arms. They were clad in multicol¬
ored clothes, “orange, blue, white, yellow, and
watermelon-colored” (Brandon, 1978). The
sight set the witnesses screaming homeward.

The resulting publicity brought investiga¬
tors and curiosity-seekers to the Reeves resi¬
dence over the next few days. At least two of
them, including Deputy Sheriff Thomas W.
Price, reported seeing strange moving lights.
There were no further reports of aliens, tree-
stump ones or otherwise, though.

See Also: Close encounters of the third kind

Further Reading

Brandon, Jim, 1978. Weird America: A Guide to
Places of Mystery in the United States. New York:
E. P. Dutton.

Tulpa

“Tulpa” is aTibetan term for an entity created
by mental concentration. Such an entity is be¬
lieved to take on at least a quasi-physical form
and to be visible to others besides its creator.

The most famous tulpa account appears in
Alexandra David-Neel’s With Mystics and Ma -
gicians in Tibet, originally published in 1931.
David-Neel, an adventurous French woman

246 The Two

educated at the Sorbonne, traveled widely
through Tibet in the early part of the twenti¬
eth century, exploring places and meeting
Buddhist holy men that no European had be¬
fore encountered. The Geographical Society
of Paris awarded her a gold medal, and the Le¬
gion of Honor knighted her.

David-Neel wrote that while living with
the Tibetan yogis, she decided to conjure up a
tulpa. She imagined him to be a fat, jolly
lama. After some months, the being came into
existence. Apparently David-Neel essentially
considered him a vivid hallucination, a kind
of imaginary companion, and she was unset¬
tled when it began to take on a reality of its
own. First, she claimed, it became no longer
necessary for her to think of it for it to appear,
and it seemed to adopt a recognizable person¬
ality and to perform appropriate actions.

“A change gradually took place in my
lama,” she said. “The countenance I had
given him altered; his chubby cheeks thinned
and his expression became vaguely cunning
and malevolent. He became more importu¬
nate. In short, he was escaping me. One day a
shepherd who was bringing me butter saw the
phantasm, which he took for a lama of flesh
and bone.”

Alarmed, she decided that she had to de¬
stroy the entity. It was not easy. It took six
months of hard mental work. She concluded,
“That I should have succeeded in obtaining a
voluntary hallucination is not surprising.
What is interesting in such cases of ‘material¬
ization’ is that other persons see the form cre¬
ated by thought.”

Though such first-person allegations of
real-life tulpas are exceedingly rare, David-
Neel’s story would inspire a great deal of spec¬
ulation that seeks to explain a broad range of
extraordinary entities, from lake monsters to
UFO humanoids, as tulpalike “thought
forms” or (in Michael Grosso’s phrase) “psy¬
choterrestrials” (Grosso, 1992).

See Also: Imaginal beings; Psychoterrestrials

Further Reading

David-Neel, Alexandra, 1957. With Mystics andMa -
gicians in Tibet. New York: University Books.

Grosso, Michael, 1992. Frontiers of the Soul: Explor -
ing Psychic Evolution. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books.

The Two

The Two were Marshall Herff Applewhite,
also known as Bo, and Bonnie Lu Nettles, also
known as Peep, two of the stranger flying-
saucer contactees. Nettles would be long dead
when Applewhite, then heading a cultlike
group called Heaven’s Gate, led thirty-eight
followers to mass suicide in a house in a
wealthy neighborhood of San Diego in March
1997. Their departure from this world—in¬
tended to free their bodies so that their souls
could board a spaceship thought to be accom¬
panying the Hale-Bopp comet—generated
headlines the world over.

Behind the tragedy lay a quarter-century of
spiritual odyssey that began in 1972, when
the psychiatrically troubled Applewhite, a
musical director at a local Episcopal church,
met Nettles, a nurse, at a Houston hospital.
The Two shared an interest in the occult, and
in Nettles, Applewhite found someone he had
been looking for: a woman with whom to es¬
tablish a platonic relationship and a shared
metaphysical mission. Applewhite’s homosex¬
uality had caused him legal and employment
problems and spiritual confusion. The occult
doctrine the Two would create, under guid¬
ance from space people, eschewed sexuality
and demanded chastity from its adherents.

Beginning in 1973, Applewhite and Net¬
tles set out on a rambling pilgrimage through
several western states. While living along
Oregon’s Rogue River, they experienced a
revelation that they were the two witnesses
who Revelation 11 had prophesied would
appear on Earth during its last days. Their
first attempt to announce themselves to a
larger world occurred in Oklahoma City,
where they introduced themselves to local
ufologist Hayden Hewes, who had a flair for
publicity. They told Hewes to announce that
they were here to help the human race as¬
cend to its next evolutionary level. According
to Hewes, they spoke as if “humans were

The Two 247

alien to them” (Hewes and Steiger, 1976).
Their behavior and general demeanor were
so odd that Hewes wondered if they were ac¬
tual extraterrestrials.

Through leaflets signed by Human Individ¬
ual Metamorphosis (HIM), the Two sought
followers. The documents identified them as
two individuals who had come from an ad¬
vanced realm to testify to the same message
that Jesus had given to the world. Those who
followed them would have to abandon all ties
to this world, including family, friends, jobs,
and possessions. When they achieved meta¬
morphosis, they would experience actual bio¬
logical and chemical changes in their bodies.

Bo and Beep, as they then called them¬
selves, made themselves available to the public
in the spring of 1975 at a meeting held in the
home of a Los Angeles psychic. Twenty-four
persons followed them to participate in further
gatherings in California, Colorado, and else¬
where, where new believers were solicited to
become Bo and Peep’s sheep. Little of this at¬
tracted press attention until twenty members
of an audience, which had come to hear the
Two in Waldport, Oregon, disappeared with
them the next day. Newspaper accounts de¬
picted the couple as mysterious. The account
even seemed to leave open the possibility that
the missing audience members had flown off
in a UFO. In fact, they had joined the pilgrim¬
age. Six weeks later, two University of Mon¬
tana sociologists found them—though not Bo
and Peep—in Arizona. Bo and Peep, fearing
assassination, had dropped out of sight. Before
their departure, however, they separated their
150 to 200 followers in autonomous “families”
of about a dozen persons each. Within each
family there was further breakdown into cou¬
ples, preferably a man and a woman, who were
to observe each other carefully. Sex and even
friendship were explicitly discouraged; the “re¬
lationship” had one purpose, which was that
each person would have his or her faults
pointed out, thus making it possible to over¬
come human limitations.

Each family went its own way, supporting
itself via meetings, contributions by new

Marshall Herff Appleivhite and Bonnie Lit Nettles,
photographed after their 1975 arrest by local police in
Harlington, Texas, for auto theft and credit card fraud
(Bettmann/Corbis)

members, and begging. The reception of such
proselytizing was usually hostile, but small
numbers of recruits filled the ranks, often re¬
placing those who had lost interest. Most fol¬
lowers were occult tourists whose fascination
with any particular metaphysical doctrine was
only passing. The failure of flying saucers to
arrive to take believers to a New World also
discouraged interest.

In early 1976, the movement, now consist¬
ing of fewer than one hundred members, re¬
treated with Bo and Beep to a mountain camp
near Laramie, Wyoming. The couples author¬
itarian control was intensified, and those
judged unqualified were forced out. By fall,
the band had relocated to Salt Lake City.
Around this time, two members inherited a
great deal of money, which they turned over
to Bo and Peep. They purchased houses
(“crafts” in their terminology) in Denver and

248 The Two

Dallas-Fort Worth and essentially removed
themselves from the world. Press stories about
them were few, though in 1979 one member
spoke with Time and recounted the day-to-
day spiritual activities of the group, which
were rigidly directed. Nettles died, apparently
of cancer, in 1985.

In 1993, the group reemerged into view
with an advertisement in USA Today and fol¬
lowed it with pronouncements in other publi¬
cations. Now calling themselves Total Over¬
comers, members lectured in various cities.
Two years later, the group, by then called
Heaven’s Gate, moved to San Diego and set
up a successful computer business with its
own web site. In October 1996, it purchased a
mansion in San Diego’s exclusive Rancho
Santa Fe.

It was there that the mass suicide occurred,
apparently on the night of March 25-26,
1997. Alerted by an anonymous phone call
(the caller was later identified as Richard Ford,
one of the group’s followers), police found the
bodies of thirty-nine identically dressed men
and women of androgynous appearance.
Some of them, it was learned, had been surgi¬
cally castrated. All had died of poison and suf¬
focation. One of them was Applewhite. Ac¬
cording to a videotaped statement, the deaths
occurred so that members could leave their

“vehicles” (bodies) and join a giant spaceship
that they believed was following the Hale-
Bopp comet.

See Also: Contactees

Further Reading

Balch, Robert W., 1995. “Waiting for the Ships: Dis¬
illusionment and the Revitalization of Faith in
Bo and Peep’s UFO Cult.” In James R. Lewis, ed.
The Gods Have Landed: Neiv Religions from Other
Worlds, 137-166. Albany, NY: State University of
New York Press.

Bruni, Frank, 1997. “Cult Leader Believed in Space
Aliens and Apocalypse.” New York Times (March
28).

“Flying Saucery in the Wilderness,” 1979. Time (Au¬
gust 27): 58.

Hewes, Hayden, and Brad Steiger, eds., 1976. UFO
Missionaries Extraordinary. New York: Pocket
Books.

Hoffmann, Bill, Cathy Burke, and the staff of the
New York Post, 1997. Heavens Gate: Cult Suicide
in San Diego. New York: Harper-Paperbacks.

Niebuhr, Gustav, 1997. “On the Furthest Fringes of
Millennialism.” New York Times (March 28).

Oliver, Evelyn Dorothy, 1997. “Graduating to the
Next Level: The Heaven’s Gate Tragedy in the
Context of New Age Ideology.” Syzygy 6,1 (Win¬
ter/Spring): 43-58.

Peters, Ted, 1977. UFOs — God’s Chariots? Flying
Saucers in Politics, Science, and Religion. Atlanta,
GA: John Knox Press.

Steiger, Brad, 1976. Gods ofAqttarius: UFOs and the
Transformation of Man. New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich.

Ulkt

Ulkt, a Martian, introduced himself through
automatic writing to a Salt Lake City UFO
buff, Mary Sewall, in early 1982. He told her
that Earth is overloaded with negative vibra¬
tions. Humans cannot join the federation of
intelligent worlds until they learn to cast posi¬
tive vibrations. If they stop conflict and im¬
moral behavior, their collective vibratory rate
will rise. Ulkt signed each communication
with what looked like an H on its side. Sewall
took this to be a symbol of infinity.

Further Reading

Sprinkle, R. Leo, ed., 1982. Proceedings: Rocky
Mountain Conference on UFO Investigation.
Laramie, WY: School of Extended Studies, Uni¬
versity of Wyoming.

Ultraterrestrials

Ultraterrestrials dwell in the superspectrum, a
field of intelligent energy capable of manipu¬
lating matter. Ultraterrestrials are among the
materialized manifestations from this alterna¬
tive reality. They appear to human beings in a
range of guises: as demons, extraterrestrials,
channeling intelligences, angels, fairies, mon¬
sters, men in black, and other supernatural en¬
tities. They are behind all of the worlds reli¬
gions, and they have manipulated history. All

ultraterrestrials have one thing in common: a
detestation of human beings and all they stand
for. Human beings who encounter them often
end up psychically enslaved or destroyed.

In Keel’s view, heavily influenced by tradi¬
tional demonology, “The Devil’s emissaries of
yesteryear have been replaced by the mysteri¬
ous ‘men in black. ’ The quasi-angels of Bibli¬
cal times have become magnificent spacemen.
The demons, devils, and false angels were rec¬
ognized as liars and plunderers by early man.
These same impostors now appear as long¬
haired Venusians” (Keel, 1970).

See Also: Channeling; Fairies encountered; Keel,
John Alva; Men in black

Further Reading

Keel, John A., 1970. UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse.
New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

Ummo

Ummo is supposedly the name of a planet
that revolves around a star known to Ummites
as Iumma, 14.6 light years from the Earth. It
is also the focus of one of the most complex,
enigmatic hoaxes in the history of the con-
tactee movement.

The episode began in February 1966 in a
Madrid suburb, where witnesses allegedly saw
a UFO hovering close to the ground. One

249

250 Ummo

One of several UFO photographs taken by “Antonio Pardo ” at San Jose de Valderas, Madrid, Spain, June 1, 1967 (Fortean
Picture Library)

witness, Jose Luis Jordan Pena, reported see¬
ing a strange symbol on the bottom of the
craft. It resembled two reverse parentheses,
with a vertical bar between them. Only Jordan
Pena told of seeing such a symbol (in fact
quite similar to the stylized H used sometimes
to represent the planet Uranus), which he de¬
scribed in a letter to prominent Spanish ufolo¬
gist Antonio Ribera. On June 1, 1967, the
same man claimed to have investigated an¬
other close encounter at San Jose de Valderas,
near Madrid. He said witnesses had told him
that they saw a symbol on the UFO’s bottom.
It was like the earlier one, except that now a
horizontal bar crossed the vertical and linked
the two reverse parentheses. The following
day, Antonio San Antonio, a newspaper pho¬
tographer, took a phone call from an anony¬
mous young man. The caller said he had
taken pictures of the UFO, and San Antonio

could pick them up at a certain photographic
laboratory. One of the pictures depicted the
curious logo.

Soon afterward, leaflets signed “Henri
Dagousset” asserted that the UFO had left
capsules in the area. “Dagousset” offered three
hundred dollars for each sample, referring tak¬
ers to a general delivery address at Madrid’s
main post office. In August, Barcelona writer
Marius Lleget, author of a recently published
UFO book, received a letter with no return
address from “Antonio Pardo.” Inside the en¬
velope were two more pictures of the San Jose
de Valderas object with the identical symbol.
Pardo said he had taken them moments after
the first photographer had snapped his. He
also enclosed a green plastic strip with the
symbol on it, explaining that he had recovered
it from a boy who had found it and a similar
strip inside a mysterious tube. (Subsequent

Ummo 251

analysis determined it to be a weather-resist¬
ant plastic developed for military and aero¬
space use. It was, in other words, of earthly
origin.) Then a man identifying himself as
Pardo phoned Lleget and spoke with him at
length. Lleget never asked for his address, and
Pardo did not provide it, to the later frustra¬
tion of Ribera and Rafael Farriols. The two
ufologists called every Antonio Pardo (An¬
thony Brown in English) in Madrid’s phone
book without ever finding anyone who would
own up to being Lleget’s informant.

A related development, investigators would
soon learn, had occurred on May 20, when
the Spanish newspaper Informaciones pub¬
lished a peculiar announcement: that soon a
flying saucer would land near Madrid to re¬
turn earthbound extraterrestrials to their
home planet, Ummo. On the evening of the
thirtieth, three persons reportedly watched a
UFO land near a restaurant in Santa Monica,
another Madrid suburb. The next day, accord¬
ing to one of the witnesses, impressions, burn
marks, and small amounts of a metallic sub¬
stance attested to the UFO’s presence. These
alleged events seemed to confirm a prediction
made by contactee Fernando Sesma, president
of the Society of the Friends of Space, on May
31. In a speech to a small group, he revealed
that since 1965 he and two associates had
been recipients of phone messages and written
communications from Ummites. They had
informed him of a sighting to occur on June
1. They provided the exact geographical coor¬
dinates. The Santa Monica incident seemed to
confirm the Ummites’ statement.

The written messages soon started to arrive
in the mail of Spanish UFO enthusiasts, then
to some of their French colleagues. Postmarks
indicated that they were sent from all over the
world, from cities in Europe to others in New
Zealand and Canada. On each page the
Ummo symbol appeared. It was the same one
Jordan Pena and other witnesses had report¬
edly seen and the anonymous young man had
photographed. The messages typically con¬
sisted of many pages of discourse on Ummite

life, society, science, technology, language,
and politics. Besides the monographs, there
were phone calls from purported Ummites,
always speaking with great precision in a
monotone voice. Untraceable or unsigned let¬
ters came from human beings who had dealt
with Ummites face to face (they were de¬
scribed as tall, blond, and Scandinavian in ap¬
pearance) and witnessed marvelous technol¬
ogy. The quantity of such material was
astounding. By 1983, according to an esti¬
mate by one knowledgeable student of the
episode, some sixty-seven hundred Ummo-
related communications were in the hands of
a variety of recipients. Most were written in
Spanish, a small minority in stilted French
that seemed to have been translated from
Spanish.

In one document, the Ummites said they
had arrived on Earth in March 1950. The fol¬
lowing April 24, they revealed in another doc¬
ument that they had stolen a number of items
from a family in an isolated house in the
French Alps. By this time, the French govern¬
ment had become interested, and at last it had
an investigatable claim. But official inquiries
turned up nothing: no police records, no evi¬
dence of the cave in which the Ummites as¬
serted they had been living between their
landing and the break-in. In the 1970s, the
San Jose de Valderas “UFO” fell victim to
photoanalysis that established that the object
was an eight-inch plate, the symbol drawn in
ink. Still, the communications continued, and
an Ummo cult grew up around them. A num¬
ber of books, mostly in Spanish and French,
would examine or celebrate Ummo.

Though no evidence supports the existence
of Ummo and Ummites, the identity of the
perpetrators of the hoax is still unknown.
French-American ufologist Jacques Vallee,
trained in astrophysics and computer sciences,
characterizes the contents of the documents as
“clever and occasionally stimulating. ... A
science journalist, a government engineer
working on advanced projects, or a frustrated
writer could match the psychological profile

252 Unholy Six

of the UMMO author” (Vallee, 1991). He
contends that the perpetrator or perpetrators
got their inspiration from Jorge Luis Borges’s
fantastic short story “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis, Ter-
tius” (1941), a fable about imaginary planets
that in some sense become “real.” Other sus¬
pects are Fernando Sesma, Jordan Pena, or
some intelligence agency involved in a psy¬
chological experiment. Hilary Evans thinks a
better, more sustained investigation by the
Spanish ufologists who probed the affair
would have produced answers and made
Ummo less mysterious than it appears to be.
Whatever the case, Ummo documents still
show up in the mail of a few individuals, most
prominently the French aerospace engineer
Jean-Pierre Petit. Whoever is beyond the
episode has expended much time and energy
to it over three decades.

Further Reading

Evans, Hilary, 1983. “Ummo: A Perfect Case?” The
Utiexplained 12, 134: 2661-2665.

-, 1983. “The Ummites Tell All.” The Unex -

plained 12, 135: 2686-2689.

-, 1983. “Ummo—Red Alert.” The Unex -

plained 12, 137: 2738-2740.

Ribera, Antonio, 1975. “The Mysterious ‘UMMO’
Affair.” Flying Saucer Review Pt. I. 20, 4 (Janu¬
ary): 20-24; Pt. II. 20, 5 (March): 13-16; Pt. III.
21, 1 (June): 26-28; Pt. IV. 21, 2 (August):
24—25, 27; Pt. V. 21, 3—4 (November): 43—46.

Vallee, Jacques, 1991. Revelations: Alien Contact and
Human Deception. New York: Ballantine Books.

Unholy Six

According to George Hunt Williamson, six
solar systems housing planets peopled by
“negative space intelligences” exist in the
Orion nebula. The “Unholy Six” live on
dying worlds, and they plan to destroy the
Earth so that they can have access to its re¬
sources. The Orion group has its own subver¬
sive agents on Earth, working with them to
undercut the work of friendly, pro-human
space visitors of the Space Confederation.
Though incapable of entering the Earth’s at¬
mosphere in their own spacecraft, the Unholy
Six project their intelligences into the brains
of certain earthlings.

Williamson wrote that the underlying cause
of conflict between the Space Confederation
and the Unholy Six is that “the former are
Deists and the latter are Ideists.” In other
words, the Space Confederation believes in a
divine power to which all are answerable, and
the Unholy Six believe only in the primacy of
the “id”—the power of the individual. “For
countless millennia there have been no possi¬
bilities of reconciliation between these
groups,” Williamson said (Williamson, 1959).

See Also: Williamson, George Hunt

Further Reading

Williamson, George Hunt, 1953. Other Tongues —
Other Flesh. Amherst, WI: Amherst Press.

-, 1959. Road in the Sky. London: Neville

Spearman.

Vadig

Vadig is an extraterrestrial invented by self-
confessed hoaxer Thomas F. Monteleone. In
March 1968, as a psychology student at the
University of Maryland, Monteleone heard
West Virginia contactee Woodrew Deren-
berger talking about his space contacts on
Washington, DC, radio station WWDC.
Derenberger claimed to have traveled to the
planet Lanulos. Convinced that Derenberger
was lying, Monteleone decided to play a prac¬
tical joke and to assert that he, too, had been
to Lanulos. He called the station under the
name “Ed Bailey” and added new details
about the planet and its people. Derenberger
readily agreed with what the caller said.

To Monteleone’s chagrin, the station was
able to trace the call. Derenberger’s manager
Harold Salkin phoned him and learned his
true identity. A week later, Salkin, Deren¬
berger, and the latter’s wife called on Mon¬
teleone, who tape-recorded the interview. In
the interview, the young man reported that
while driving home on an interstate highway
he witnessed a UFO landing. Two aliens
emerged, and one introduced himself as
Vadig. Two months later, Vadig showed up at
the Washington restaurant where Monteleone
worked part-time. He arranged a meeting,
ending the encounter, as he had before, with

the enigmatic words “I’ll see you in time.”
The following Sunday night, Vadig drove the
young man into rural Maryland where they
boarded a spaceship and flew to Lanulos,
where the inhabitants walk about naked. One
week later Monteleone met Vadig and another
Lanulosian for the last time.

Not long after the initial interview the
Derenbergers and Salkin returned to talk
once more, bringing along with them occult
journalist John A. Keel. Keel, who thought
Monteleone had revealed information only a
real contactee would know, wrote about the
Vadig encounter in later magazine articles
and in a book. When Vadig said he would
“see you in time,” according to Keel, he was
hinting that UFO beings “originate outside
of our time frame. . . . UFOs are from an¬
other time cycle vastly different from our
own” (Keel, 1969).

Monteleone went on to a short career as a
public contactee. His story appears in a book
Derenberger wrote with Harold W. Hubbard
in 1970, cited as evidence of the authenticity
of Lanulos and the author’s experiences with
it. In 1979, in a short article in Omni, Mon¬
teleone confessed the hoax, noting, “I contra¬
dicted Mr. Derenberger’s story on purpose.
But on each occasion, he would give
ground . . . and in the end corroborate my

253

254 Val Thor

own falsifications. He even claimed to know
personally the ‘UFOnaut’ who contacted me!”
A fuller account of the episode appeared in
1980 in a Fate article by ufologist Karl T.
Pflock. By this time Monteleone had em¬
barked on what was to prove a successful ca¬
reer as a science-fiction writer.

Further Reading

Derenberger, Woodrow W., and Harold W Hub¬
bard, 1971. Visitors from Lanulos. New York:
Vantage Press.

Keel, John A., 1975. The Mothman Prophecies. New
York: Saturday Review Press/E. P. Dutton and
Company.

-, 1969. “The Time Cycle Factor.” Flying

Saucer Review 15, 3 (May/June): 9-13.

Monteleone, Thomas F., 1979. “Last Word: The
Gullibility Factor.” Omni 1 (May): 146.

Pflock, Karl T., 1980. “Anatomy of a UFO Hoax.”
Fate'S 3, 11 (November): 40-48.

Val Thor

Val (or Valiant) Thor, a Venusian, met Frank
E. Stranges, evangelist and contactee, in the
Pentagon one morning in December 1959. At
the time Stranges was conducting a Christian
crusade in Washington. An anonymous Pen¬
tagon official of his acquaintance invited him
to the building. In one room he met a hand¬
some, tanned man with wavy brown hair. In
the course of a half-hour conversation, the
stranger informed him that he was from
Venus. Over the course of years, Stranges flew
on spacecraft with Val Thor and wrote two
books about their experiences together.

Stranges reported that Venusians are physi¬
cally like humans in all ways, except that they
do not have fingerprints. Fingerprints “are a
sign of fallen man,” according to Val Thor
(Stranges, 1974). Venusians, who are without
sin, are devout Christians, but they have no
need for the Bible because of their closeness to
its author. In their first meeting Stranges
learned that seventy-seven Venusians were liv¬
ing secretly in the United States, but that
number was subject to constant change be¬
cause the Space Brothers were always coming
and going. Val himself was scheduled to re¬

turn to Venus on March 16, I960. The Venu¬
sians had come to Earth to “help mankind re¬
turn to the Lord.”

On the morning of February 5, 1968, Val
Thor phoned Stranges and instructed him to
meet at the San Diego Airport. From there,
the two drove across the border into a coastal
town in Sonora, Mexico. Near there, they
boarded a flying saucer with a large crew, in¬
cluding a woman named Teel. Inside Val’s
compartment, Stranges learned that his friend
had spoken with Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, then
running for the Democratic nomination to the
presidency. Kennedy had written Val a letter
requesting a meeting, and Val had responded.
Val found Kennedy “nervous and suspicious.”
That evening aboard the spaceship, as they
watched a large televisionlike screen, Stranges,
Val, and several dozen Venusians sorrowfully
observed Kennedy’s assassination.

On another occasion, in January 1974,
Stranges flew to Las Vegas to meet Val and
friends. At the airport, two young men
dressed in black called him by name. Assum¬
ing they were the space people who were to
take him to Val Thor, he followed them into a
black Cadillac. Suddenly, they and a third,
similarly clad man turned on him and were
beating him severely when two men—space
people—came to the rescue. They caused the
Cadillac and the three men in black, agents of
dark forces opposed to the Venusians’ benevo¬
lent mission, to disappear. They then took
Stranges to the scheduled conference with Val
inside a flying saucer.

Still an active lecturer and saucer personal¬
ity, Stranges claims to have photographic proof
of Val’s existence. The photographs, repro¬
duced in his books and shown at his lectures,
depict a man dressed in a suit and surrounded
by other persons in what look like ordinary so¬
cial situations. Val Thor resembles a Holly¬
wood bit player more than an extraterrestrial.

Further Reading

Stranges, Frank E., 1974. My Friend from beyond
Earth. Second edition. Van Nuys, CA: Interna¬
tional Evangelism Crusades.

Van Tassel, George W. 255

-, 1972. The Stranger at the Pentagon. Second

edition. Van Nuys, CA: International Evangelism
Crusades.

Valdar

In I960, a young man identified only as
Edwin was working in a factory in Durban,
South Africa, when he met and befriended a
new supervisor. One night while the two were
fishing together, the latter spoke into a me¬
chanical device, called up space people, and
produced a sky show with UFOs. Soon after¬
ward, the man confessed to Edwin that his
real name was Valdar. He also told Edwin that
he was from Koldas, a planet that existed in
an anti-matter universe to which he must
soon return. He left Edwin the device before
he disappeared. In a few months, the two
were talking over the interdimensional radio.
Edwin learned that Koldas is one planet in a
twelve-world confederation.

The exchange continued for years. Before
long, Edwin channeled the messages rather
than taking them through the radio. Many of
the messages were of a technical and scientific
nature. Others were occult and metaphysical.
In 1986, South African ufologist Carl van
Vlierden published a book-length account of
Edwin’s alleged experiences and messages.

Further Reading

Hind, Cynthia, 1996. UFOs over Africa. Madison,
WI: Horus House.

Van Vlierden, Carl, and Wendelle C. Stevens, 1986.
UFO Contact from Planet Koldas. Tucson, AZ:
UFO Photo Archives.

Van Tassel, George W (1910-1978)

Besides being a contactee himself, George Van
Tassel made his mark as the foremost pro¬
moter of the early contactee movement. Every
year he sponsored the Giant Rock Interplane¬
tary Spacecraft Convention at his residence in
the high desert between Yucca Valley and
Joshua Tree, California. He also introduced
Ashtar, among the most ubiquitous and
beloved of channeling entities, to the occult
and flying-saucer world.

Bom in Ohio, Van Tassel moved to Califor¬
nia in 1930 with his family. He worked as an
aircraft technician for, among others, Howard
Hughes. In 1947, the Van Tassels took up resi¬
dence inside an immense, partially hollowed-
out rock called simply Giant Rock. Van Tassel
started receiving psychic messages from extra¬
terrestrials in January 1952, the first of them
from “Lutbunn, senior in command first wave,
planet patrol, realms of Schare [pronounced
Share-ee, a starship station in space]. We have
your contact aboard 80,000 feet above this
place” (Van Tassel, 1952). A flood of other
messages followed in the next days, weeks, and
months, all from peace-loving space people as¬
sociated with the Council of Seven Lights on
the planet Shanchea. Van Tassel wrote what
may be the first contactee book, in the modern
sense, I Rode a Flying Saucer! (1952). Its title
notwithstanding, at that point all of his con¬
tacts had been mental ones. Not until August
24, 1953, would Van Tassel board a spacecraft
(or “ventla,” in the vocabulary of his space
friends).

Beginning in early 1953, Van Tassel held
weekly public channeling sessions. The Giant
Rock conventions began that spring, attract¬
ing the new contactee stars and their followers
and affording the emerging movement much
publicity. Soon Van Tassel, in person and
through his College of Universal Wisdom,
was raising money for the Integratron, a ma¬
chine to be built according to extraterrestrials’
specifications. It was supposed to rejuvenate
tissue and restore youthful vigor. By 1959, the
structure was partially built, but for all Van
Tassel’s subsequent efforts it would never be
completed.

More than any other single figure, Van Tas¬
sel gave direction and cohesion to what other¬
wise would have been a disparate movement.
He supported contactees whose claims—as
was often the case—conflicted with his own,
to the expense of his own credibility. Ufologist
Isabel L. Davis, for example, saw him as a
charlatan who knew fully well that the contact
stories were bogus. Others, however, judged
him to be sincere and dedicated to a meta-

256 Vegetable Man

George Van Tassel (right) with Long John Nebel (Fortean Picture Library)

physical vision in which, however outlandish
it may have seemed to others, he truly be¬
lieved.

Van Tassel died in Santa Ana, California,
on February 9, 1978. Since then, some chan¬
neled have reported messages from him. “I
was immediately taken into fellowship with
the Great Masters of the Council of which I
wrote,” he told one (Tuella, 1989).

See Also: Ashtar; Channeling; Contactees

Further Reading

Curran, Douglas, 1985. In Advance of the Landing:
Folk Concepts of Outer Space. New York: Abbeville
Press.

Davis, Isabel L., 1957. “Meet the Extraterrestrial.”
Fantastic Universe 8, 5 (November): 31-59.

Reeve, Bryant, and Helen Reeve, 1957. Flying Saucer
Pilgrimage. Amherst, WI: Amherst Press.

Tuella [pseud, of Thelma B. Turrell], ed., 1989.
Ashtar: A Tribute. Third edition. Salt Lake City,
UT: Guardian Action Publications.

Van Tassel, George W., 1952. I Rode a Flying Saucer!
The Mystery of the Flying Saucers Revealed. Los
Angeles: New Age Publishing Company.

-, 1958. The Council of Seven Lights. Los An¬
geles: DeVorss and Company.

Vegetable Man

Jennings Frederick, a young West Virginia
man, claimed that while bow-and-arrow
hunting one afternoon in July 1968, he heard
a “high-pitched jabbering, much like that of a
recording running at exaggerated speed.”
Even so, he could understand it, and it was
communicating to him that he should not be
afraid. “I come as a friend,” the voice said.
“We know of you all. I come in peace. I wish
medical assistance. I need your help.” Then
Frederick saw the creature whom wags would
soon dub Vegetable Man.

The being had semi-human facial features.
Its ears were long, its eyes yellow and slanted,
and it had very thin arms about the size of a
quarter in diameter. It had three seven-inch-
long fingers at the end of each arm. Instead of

Villanuevas visitors 257

fingertips, the fingers had needlelike tips and
suction cups. Its slender body looked like the
stalk of a plant, and so did its color: green.

Suddenly the entity gripped Frederick’s
hand. Before he realized what was happening,
it was drawing blood from it. Then its eyes
turned red, and they began to rotate like spin¬
ning orange circles. The effect was hypnotic.
Frederick no longer felt any pain from the ex¬
traction, which lasted a minute or so. After¬
ward, a restored Vegetable Man bounded up a
nearby hill, each of his steps covering twenty-
five feet.

Frederick’s pain resumed. As he started to
walk home, he heard a humming sound. It
made him panic because he thought the entity
might be coming after him in its flying saucer.
He ran as fast as he could and got back home
unharmed.

Frederick was friends with Gray Barker of
Clarksburg, West Virginia, a publisher and
promoter of outlandish saucer materials.
Barker was also a self-confessed hoaxer and
encouraged other hoaxers. For a time, Veg¬
etable Man played a large role in Barker’s pro¬
motions. No one else has ever reported an en¬
counter with him.

Further Reading

Steiger, Brad, 1978 . Alien Meetings. New York: Ace
Books.

Venudo

Dan Boone, the son-in-law of George W. Van
Tassel, a leading figure in the contactee move¬
ment of the 1950s and 1960s, was in a Yucca
Valley, California, liquor store early one Satur¬
day evening when he heard a group of peo¬
ple—two men and two women—ask for di¬
rections to Giant Rock. He offered to lead
them there, and they followed him to the site.
Boone assumed they were there to attend the
weekly channeling and discussion group Van
Tassel held. He was right. The leader, who
said his name was Venudo, sat near Boone
and Van Tassel while the other three rested on
a couch nearby.

Venudo casually produced a device that had
been hanging around his neck. He tapped it
and, in full view of about thirty witnesses, he
vanished instantly. A minute later he became
visible again. Boone asked him if he could do
that once more, and Venudo obliged. This time
Boone reached over and felt Venudo’s shoulder,
though he could not see it. According to
Boone, Venudo and his friends were space peo¬
ple checking in on Van Tassel’s activities.

See Also: Channeling; Contactees; Van Tassel,
George W.

Further Reading

Hamilton, William F., Ill, 1996. Alien Magic: UFO
Crashes — Abductions—Underground Bases. New
Brunswick, NJ: Global Communications.

Villanueva’s visitors

In 1953, Salvador Villanueva Medina’s claimed
encounter with friendly men from another
world sparked international excitement. Fol¬
lowers of the emerging contactee movement
saw it as evidence that the space people were
now expanding their mission to Latin America,
and for a time Villanueva became something of
a hero in that region’s occult world.

As the story went, Villanueva, a taxi and
limousine driver, was contracted to drive from
Mexico City up to Laredo, Texas. He and his
two passengers from Texas left Mexico City
on the morning of August 22. In the late af¬
ternoon, the car’s differential gave out, and
Villanueva managed to roll the car to the side
of the highway before it came to a complete
stop. The two passengers decided to walk to
the nearest village to see if they could find a
mechanic. The driver stayed with the car and
did what he could to get it running again. He
jacked up the car and crawled underneath it
and began tinkering. There was little traffic,
and he felt very much alone.

Darkness had fallen when he heard foot¬
steps. From beneath the vehicle, he saw two
legs covered in what look like corduroy. He
crawled out uneasily and stood to face the
man. The stranger had a pale white face. He
was dressed in a one-piece suit and had a

258 VTVenus

three-inch-wide belt around his waist. Lights
shone from little holes in the belt, and he was
holding a helmet under his arm. He had fine
features and a penetrating stare. He had
shoulder-length gray hair and his face was
hairless. He was four feet tall.

Too stunned and frightened to speak, Vil¬
lanueva could not find the words to respond to
two questions, spoken in fluent Spanish, about
what was wrong with the car. Finally, he man¬
aged to ask if the man was an aviator. The little
man replied in the affirmative, then added an
odd remark about “my machine which you
people call an airplane.” He indicated that it
was parked behind a mound not far away.

Feeling more comfortable, Villanueva in¬
vited him to sit down in the car. But at that
moment the lights on the belt started to flash,
and a buzzing noise sounded. The stranger
donned his helmet and walked toward the
hill. The driver returned to his business with
the car, and not long afterward two motorcy¬
cle police officers came by and ordered him to
take the vehicle off the road. Afterward, he lay
down to sleep inside it.

Sometime later, knocks sounded on the
window. Groggily Villanueva sat up, assuming
that his passengers had returned. He was sur¬
prised to see instead the “aviator” and a com¬
panion, the latter a taller version of the first.
They entered the car and conversed with the
driver. The shorter one did most of the talking.
As they described their home, Villanueva real¬
ized that they were space people. It took him
awhile to decide that they were not joking.

Over the next few hours, he learned much
about their home world, its civilization, its
cities, its technology, and more. Thousands of
years ago, he was told, many destructive wars
were fought between the planet’s nations,
until finally its inhabitants established a one-
world government under what amounted to a
benevolent dictatorship of a council of wise
men. The state raised and educated the chil¬
dren, and there was no serious poverty. People
from this planet live undetected among earth¬
lings, reporting on human affairs to their oth¬
erworldly superiors.

Toward dawn the buzzing sounds, emanat¬
ing from either the helmets or the belts, re¬
sumed. The two left the car, with Villanueva
following. Eventually, they came to the ship, a
saucer-shaped structure. The men invited him
inside the craft, but at that moment he lost his
nerve and fled back to the car. From it he saw
the saucer ascend and disappear in the direc¬
tion of the rising sun.

When his experience became known soon
afterward, Villanueva was compared to the
prominent American contactee George
Adamski. Adamski met Villanueva in Mexico
in the spring of 1955 and asked him a series
of questions. An American couple that also
was there would write, “If the questions as¬
tounded us, so did the answers. Salvador
passed his examination at the hands of a man
who, having seen a saucer himself, knew how
to ask about certain things which no mere
imaginary contact could give the answers to”
(Reeve and Reeve, 1957). Desmond Leslie,
Adamski s associate and co-author, visited Vil¬
lanueva later that year. Leslie claimed that
Adamski had confided “the Key” to him, ex¬
plaining that “every man who has received a
true and physical contact with men from
other worlds has been given a certain ‘Key’
whereby it shall be known that he is speaking
truly. No man. . . could ever stumble upon
this key by guess or chance. . . . Villanueva
gave it without hesitation” (Good, 1998).

Unlike Adamski and other contactees of the
period, Villanueva did not embark on a profes¬
sional career. So far as is known, he claimed no
further meetings with extraterrestrials.

See Also: Adamski, George; Contactees

Further Reading

Good, Timothy, 1998. Alien Base: Earth’s Encounters
with Extraterrestrials. London: Century.

Reeve, Bryant, and Helen Reeve, 195 1. Flying Saucer
Pilgrimage. Amherst, WI: Amherst Press.

VlVenus

The woman who called herself “VlVenus”—
“Viv” for short—made her mark in the mid-
1970s to the early 1980s. She said she was a

Volmo 259

Venusian who replaced a woman, her exact
physical double, who had committed suicide
in a New York hotel on September 24, I960.
As she was brought to Earth that night, she
lost all memory of her life on Venus, “a world
of Love” ( VIVenus , 1982). The memories re¬
turned seven years later, and she embarked on
a mission to reform this corrupt, cruel planet.

From Christmas 1974 until mid-1982, Viv
walked an average of ten miles a day and
preached the cosmic gospel to whoever would
listen. When she wasn’t preaching, she was
playing guitar and singing interplanetary
hymns. In 1980, she campaigned for her fa¬
vorite presidential candidate under the slogan
“It’s Not Odd to Vote for God” (Shoemaker,
1980).

Further Reading

Shoemaker, Susan, 1980. “A Venusian Visitor Goes
Campaigning.” Oakland [California] Tribune
(July 13).

VIVenus: Starchild, 1982. New York: Global Com¬
munications.

Volmo

Ted Rice grew up in rural Alabama. Early in
life he learned that he had psychic abilities, and
he was aware of what he took to be spirit guides
but later identified as extraterrestrials. One of
these was a reptoid entity named Volmo.

Volmo communicated spiritual truths to
Rice as he slept. It was only when he saw Volmo
that he realized Volmo was not an angel but a
grotesque-looking alien. Under hypnosis, in an
ostensible reliving of his first physical en¬
counter, he remarked that Volmo “just isn’t
human. . .. He’s really tall... six and a half feet
tall.. . and massive. He’s got a strong, powerful
body, and it’s dark colored, dull gray or olive
brown. ... They’re dark, sort of yellow-gold,
with sharp teeth. . . . There are only three or
four fingers on each hand, and I think they’re
webbed. The hands look clawlike, because he’s
got these long, pointed nails on each finger.”

See Also: King Leo; Reptoid child; Reptoids

Further Reading

Turner, Karla, 1994. Masquerade of Angels. Roland,
AR: Kelt Works.

Walk-ins

Ruth Montgomery popularized the notion of
the “Walk-in,” highly evolved souls who take
over the bodies of human beings who are will¬
ing to relinquish them. These beings are be¬
lieved to be so advanced that it is not practi¬
cal, or sometimes even possible, for them to
go through the normal process of reincarna¬
tion, starting out as a baby. In any event, they
have no time to waste and a serious mission to
fulfill. In Montgomery’s words:

There are Walk-ins on this planet. Tens of
thousands of them. Enlightened beings, who,
after successfully completing numerous incar¬
nations, have attained sufficient awareness of
the meaning of life that they can forego the
time-consuming process of birth and child¬
hood, returning directly [to] the adult
bodies. . . . The motivation of the Walk-in is
humanitarian. He returns to physical being
in order to help others help themselves,
planting seed-concepts that will grow and
flourish for the benefit of mankind. (Mont¬
gomery, 1979)

Walk-ins, according to Montgomery, in¬
clude Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Christo¬
pher Columbus, Abraham Lincoln, Gandhi,
Mary Baker Eddy, Thomas Jefferson, Ben¬
jamin Franklin, and others who have played

large roles in politics, religion, the arts, and
other aspects of human life.

In a later elaboration of the notion, Mont¬
gomery contended that there are also extrater¬
restrial Walk-ins, in other words the souls of
kindly space people who have possessed (after
mutual agreement) the bodies of humans. The
extraterrestrial Walk-ins are among the ad¬
vanced souls that come to guide humans into
a New Age of peace, harmony, and spiritual
insight.

Further Reading

Montgomery, Ruth, 1979. Strangers among Us: En -
lightened Beings from a World to Come. New York:
Coward, McCann, and Geoghegan.

-, 1983. Threshold to Tomorrow. New York:

G. P. Putnams Sons.

-, 1985. Aliens among Us. New York: G. P

Putnam’s Sons.

Walton’s abduction

Few UFO abduction cases are as spectacular
or as puzzling as one that allegedly took place
in November 1975 in a remote area of east-
central Arizona. Forestry worker Travis Wal¬
ton’s five-day disappearance received world¬
wide attention when it occurred, and it has
since been the subject of books, television dra¬
mas, a movie, polygraph tests, and endless
controversy.

261

262 Walton’s abduction

UFO abductee Travis Walton (Dennis Stacy/Fortean
Picture Library)

The incident began as the seven-member
crew of young men, ranging in age from sev¬
enteen to twenty-eight, were quitting work at
6 A.M. on November 5. As they left the site,
located in the Apache-Sitgreaves National
Forest, they noticed, ahead of them, a brilliant
glow, its source hidden by the trees. As their
pickup continued down the road, they ob¬
served a disc-shaped structure, approximately
one-hundred feet in diameter, twenty feet
wide, and eight feet high. It was hovering
twenty feet above a clearing. As the pickup
slowed down, Walton jumped out and ran to¬
ward the object. According to Walton’s own
testimony as well as what other crew members
subsequently told law-enforcement authori¬
ties and civilian ufologists, Walton got within
six feet of the bottom of the craft. Sounds
began to come from the UFO, unnerving
Walton, who was starting to back away when
a bluish green beam hit him, shooting him
back some ten feet.

Terrified, the others fled in the truck. A few
minutes later, their panic somewhat subsided,
they returned to retrieve their coworker, only to
find no trace of him. After twenty minutes of
fruitless searching, they drove to nearby Fleber,
Arizona, and reported the disappearance to the
authorities. The crew returned to the site in the
company of two sheriff’s officers. They found
no clues to tip them off to Walton’s where¬
abouts. At midnight, Walton’s mother and
other family members were notified. The next
day searches resumed. By now the authorities
suspected that either the crew had murdered
Walton and concocted a wild UFO tale to
cover up the deed or Walton and his brother
Duane had engineered a hoax for monetary
reasons. No actual evidence supported either of
these suppositions, but the alternative—that a
UFO had kidnapped Travis Walton—was too
outlandish to be taken seriously.

As publicity spread, reporters, ufologists,
and curiosity-seekers descended on the scene,
and charges and countercharges flew. The au¬
thorities insisted that the witnesses undergo
polygraph examination. According to exam¬
iner Cy Gilson, the results in five cases were
positive—indicating that the men had given a
sincere account—and in one instance incon¬
clusive. Sheriff Marlin Gillespie declared that
he was now convinced that the UFO story
was true, after all.

Near midnight on November 10, Walton’s
brother-in-law Grant Neff took a call, which
he first took to be a prank, from a weak¬
voiced, confused-sounding man who claimed
to be Travis Walton. The caller said he was
phoning from a gas station in Heber, thirty
miles east of Taylor, where Neff and his wife
lived. When Neff seemed ready to hang up,
the voice became desperate, and Neff realized
that he was indeed speaking with Travis. Neff
and Duane Walton drove to Heber and found
Travis at a phone both near the station, shiv¬
ering in the same clothes he had been wearing
five days earlier. It was only eighteen degrees
outside.

A complex series of events followed, with
hoax charges being leveled by some (though

Walton’s abduction 263

not all) local police officers and then by
William H. Spaulding, head of a Phoenix-
based group called Ground Saucer Watch. Jim
and Coral Lorenzen, directors ofTucson’s Aer¬
ial Phenomena Research Organization
(APRO), entered the investigation and, with
the National Enquirer, arranged for Walton to
take a secret polygraph test. It was adminis¬
tered by John J. McCarthy, who did not hide
his skepticism of Walton’s claim and grilled
him about a youthful scrape with the law. Af¬
terward, when Walton had taken the exami¬
nation, McCarthy declared that he had
flunked it. Walton’s critics cited the test as rea¬
son to reject Walton’s story, while his defend¬
ers disputed the results as the consequence of
a hostile examiner’s harassment of an already
shaken witness. In any case, the results were
suppressed and did not come to light until
UFO debunker Philip J. Klass learned about
it sometime later from McCarthy.

The following February, Duane Walton
and then Travis took a polygraph, this one run
by George J. Pfeifer. Pfeifer concluded that
their responses were truthful. Mary Kellett,
their mother, whom some had accused of
being a conspirator in a hoax, also passed the
test, in Pfeifer’s judgment.

Walton would tell the same story without
elaboration over the next two decades and
more. Fie reported that after the beam hit
him, he lost consciousness and had no mem¬
ory of anything until he awoke in what he
thought was a hospital. The atmosphere was
wet and heavy, and he had a hard time breath¬
ing in it. Three humanoid figures with big
staring eyes, large hairless heads, and tiny
mouths, ears, and noses, stood by the bedside.

Terrified, he leaped out of bed and pushed
one into another. Grabbing a cylindrical tube
he noticed on a shelf jutting from the wall, he
waved it like a weapon toward the beings,
who put out their hands as if to stop him.
After a short time, they fled through a door
behind them. Soon afterward Walton ran out
the door himself and ran to his left, through a
curving, three-feet-wide corridor. Seeing an
open room to his right, he ducked into it. The

A drawing by Travis Waltons boss, Michael Rogers, based
on Waltons description of the being he saw when he was
abditcted (Fortean Picture Library)

room seemed empty, though Walton was
nervous about a high-backed metal chair in
the middle. Because he was observing it from
the back, he did not know if anyone was sit¬
ting in it or not. No one was. As Walton ap¬
proached it, the lights in the room began to
dim. When he stepped back, the light re¬
turned. As he went forward again, the light
dimmed again, and now stars surrounded
him. Fie did not know if he was witnessing a
planetarium effect or if the room had become
transparent. He would recall that the experi¬
ence was “like sitting in a chair in the middle
of space” (Walton, 1978).

On the right arm of the chair, he saw a
panel of buttons and a screen with black
lines going up and down. On the left there
was a lever. Curious, Walton pushed the
lever forward. Suddenly the lines on the
screen moved, and the stars began to spin
even while maintaining their relative posi¬
tions. When he let go of the lever, everything
returned to the way it had been before. After

264 Walton’s abduction

he stood up, the light returned to the room,
and the stars disappeared.

At that point, a human-looking figure
wearing a spacesuit and helmet entered the
room. He stood over six feet tall, looked to be
about two-hundred pounds, and had blond
hair long enough to cover his ears. His skin
was deeply tanned. Thinking that the stranger
was a fellow human being (even though he
would recall that the eyes were peculiar, a
“strange bright golden hazel”), Walton felt re¬
lieved and peppered him with questions. In
response the figure only grinned, then beck¬
oned him to follow. He took Walton’s arm,
and the two proceeded down the curving hall¬
way. They came to a door and opened it to
enter a tiny “metal cubicle” of a room. They
passed through it into a huge space that Wal¬
ton thought looked like a hangar of some
kind. Inside it was bright as sunshine, and
breezes blew as if they were outdoors. He real¬
ized that they had just left the craft. When he
turned to examine it, he observed that it re¬
sembled the UFO he had seen in the clearing
but this one was bigger. He also saw two other
identical but smaller craft parked near the
wall.

They then went through another door into
another hallway, strolling past a number of
closed double doors until finally they entered
yet another room. Inside this room two men
and a woman sat, not only dressed like his
companion but looking enough like him that
Walton wondered if they were related to him.
They were all good-looking, and the woman’s
hair was longer than the men’s. The three were
not wearing helmets. Walton had assumed
that he had not been able to communicate
with the first man because the stranger could
not hear him through the helmet. But like the
first man, they did not respond to Walton’s
questions, just smiled pleasantly. When the
helmeted man left, the others led him to a
table. Suddenly frightened, Walton demanded
to know what they were doing. The woman
forced something that looked like an oxygen
mask with no connecting tubes onto his face.
He passed out. The next thing he knew, he

was lying on his back near Heber, ten miles
from where he had been before all of this
started. In the darkness “one of those round
craft [hovered] there for just a second. I
looked up just as a light went out. A white
light just went off on the bottom of it. The
craft was dark, and it wasn’t giving off any
light” (Barry, 1978).

Walton’s return was an international news
event. Soon afterward, UFO debunker Philip
J. Klass embarked on what would amount to a
lifelong crusade to prove that Walton, his
family, and the logging crew had conspired to
hoax the incident. No very good evidence of a
hoax would emerge, however, even after one
of the crew was reportedly offered ten thou¬
sand dollars to expose the story. Walton went
on to marry, become a family man and re¬
spected member of his community, and write
two books on his experience, the second con¬
taining a long and pointed rejoinder to the
skeptics’ case. On February 1, 1993, Travis
Walton, Duane Walton, and witness Allen
Dalis (who had not seen Travis in two
decades) underwent new polygraph examina¬
tions, again administered by Cy Gilson.
Gilson judged them to be telling the truth
when they responded affirmatively to the
UFO questions and negatively to the hoax
charges. In March 1993 Paramount Pictures
released a movie drama, Fire in the Sky, based
loosely on the incident, with D. B. Sweeney
in the role ofTravis.

Few students of this complex episode be¬
lieve it to be a hoax. Alternative, non-UFO
explanations tend to focus on psychological
or natural causes. One theory holds that
Walton and his companions saw an earth¬
quake light—a luminous phenomenon gen¬
erated by electrical fields in rocks in fault
zones—that triggered hallucinations. A
problem with this hypothesis is the thinly
clad Walton’s survival in the woods over five
bitterly cold mountain nights. The Walton
abduction story remains one of the most in¬
triguing cases of the UFO age.

Interestingly, Walton’s is one of the first
two cases in the UFO literature to describe

Waltons abduction 265

A dramatization of the abdiiction of Travis Walton as seen in the movie Fire in the Sky, 1993 (Photofest)

the gray aliens that would assume a promi- November 1975. It was known to ufologists
nent role in the abduction phenomenon of Jim and Coral Lorenzen, who were quietly in-
later years. The other incident was one of vestigating it when the Walton story erupted
which Walton could not have been aware in into the headlines. U.S. Air Force Sergeant

266 Wanderers

Charles Moody had confided to them that the
previous August 13, he saw a UFO in the
New Mexico desert and was taken aboard. In
early N ovember, in a letter to the Lorenzens,
he had this to say of the occupants: “The be¬
ings were about five feet tall and very much
like us except their heads were larger and hair¬
less, their eyes very small [,] and the mouth
had very thin lips” (Lorenzen and Lorenzen,
1977). Moody’s description is virtually identi¬
cal to the one Walton gave to the first group
of humanoids he allegedly encountered. Wal¬
ton’s also anticipated later abduction lore in
claiming to see both little gray entities and the
more humanlike beings whom some ufolo¬
gists would call Nordics aboard the same ship.

Further Reading

Barry, Bill, 1978. Ultimate Encounter: The True Story
of a UFO Kidnapping. New York: Pocket Books.

Bullard, Thomas E., 1987. UFO Abductions: The
Measure of a Mystery. Volume 1: Comparative
Study of Abductions. Volume 2: Catalogue of Cases.
Mount Rainier, MD: Fund for UFO Research.

Clark, Jerome, 1998. “Walton Abduction Case.” In
Jerome Clark. The UFO Encyclopedia, Second
Edition: The Phenomenon from the Beginning,
981-998. Detroit, MI: Omnigraphics.

Gansberg, Judith M., and Alan L. Gansberg, 1980.
Direct Encounters: The Personal Histories of UFO
Abductees. New York: Walker and Company.

Klass, Philip J., 1989. UFO Abductions: A Dangerous
Game. Updated edition. Buffalo, NY: Prome¬
theus Books.

Lorenzen, Coral, and Jim Lorenzen, 1977. Abducted!
Confrontations with Beings from Outer Space. New
York: Berkley.

Persinger, Michael A., 1979. “Possible Infrequent
Geophysical Sources of Close UFO Encounters:
Expected Physical and Behavioral Biological Ef¬
fects.” In Richard F. Haines, ed. UFO Phenomena
and the Behavioral Scientist, 396-433. Metuchen,
NJ: Scarecrow Press.

Walton, Travis, 1978. The Walton Experience. New
York: Berkley Medallion Books.

-, 1996. Fire in the Sky: The Walton Experi -

ence. New York: Marlowe and Company.

Wanderers

Wanderers are extraterrestrials who traverse
the cosmos in search of what George Hunt

Williamson calls “trash can worlds”—in other
words, backward planets such as the Earth.
When they find such a world, they offer their
souls to the reincarnation cycle. On Earth
their leader was the Elder Brother—also
known as the Son of Thought Incarnate and,
in a later life, Jesus Christ. The Elder Brother
came to this planet accompanied by one hun¬
dred forty-four thousand Lesser Avatars. Over
the centuries, many forgot their cosmic ori¬
gins and mission, but some kept the faith.
After World War II, with the coming of flying
saucers, the seeding process accelerated. A
“space friend” told Williamson, “Many of our
people are in your world now. There are
nearly ten million of them, with six of those
million in the United States itself.”

See Also: Williamson, George Hunt

Further Reading

Williamson, George Hunt, 1953. Other Tongues —
Other Flesh. Amherst, WI: Amherst Press.

White Eagle

White Eagle, believed to represent the New
Testament’s Saint John, was channeled
through British spiritualist medium Grace
Cooke (also known as Minesta) from the
1930s until her death in 1979. By the 1950s,
White Eagle’s teachings had found their way
to North America. White Eagle taught an
eclectic mix of Christian-based ideas and rein¬
carnation theories as well as the occult doc¬
trine of the Great White Brotherhood. He ad¬
vocated kindness toward one’s fellows and
vegetarianism, and love for animals.

Further Reading

Melton, J. Gordon, 1996. Encyclopedia of American
Religions. Detroit, MI: Gale Research.

White’s little people

One August night in 1891, hours before he
would leave his native El Dorado, Kansas, to
move to Kansas City and become one of Amer¬
ica’s most highly regarded journalists, William
Allen White was awakened by the bright
moonlight streaming in through his back win¬
dow. He was about to turn his head in the op-

Wilcox’s Martians 267

posite direction when he thought he heard
music. Looking outside, he saw a group of little
people—no more than three or four inches
high—dancing under the elm tree. They also
seemed to be humming along with the melody.
The scene was clear and unmistakable.

Yet, still unable to credit his senses, he
turned away, then glanced back. The strange
tiny figures were still there. He got up and
looked through another window in case the
whole scene was simply a trick of light. He
could still see the figures. He moved about
vigorously to discharge any extant images
kept over from sleep. After five minutes the
little people began to fade away, and soon
only the grass on which they had been mov¬
ing remained.

Exhausted, he returned to bed and fell
asleep. He would never forget the incident.
Recalling it many years later in his autobiog¬
raphy, he reflected ruefully, “When I recall
that hour I am so sure that I was awake I
think maybe I am still crazy.”

See Also: Fairies encountered

Further Reading

White, William Allen, 1946. Autobiography. New
York: Macmillan.

Wilcox’s Martians

As he went about his chores on the morning
of April 24, 1964, Newark Valley, New York,
dairy farmer Gary T. Wilcox had a premoni¬
tion that something out of the ordinary was
going to happen that day. Driving his tractor
up a hill, he glimpsed a shiny object just in¬
side a nearby clump of woods. He stopped the
tractor, got off, and walked toward the woods.
The closer perspective allowed him to see that
the object was an egg-shaped structure,
twenty feet long and sixteen feet wide, hover¬
ing two feet above the ground. All the while it
emitted a sound that to Wilcox’s ears was like
a car idling. Just after he touched the UFO,
two Martians came up from under it.

Wilcox did not learn of their planet of ori¬
gin immediately, but the figures did not look
earthly. Four feet tall and two feet wide, they

were clad in silver suits that covered their en¬
tire bodies. Each carried a small tray filled
with soil and plant samples. An eerie voice ad¬
dressed him, apparently from the chest of the
nearer figure (the other stood near the UFO).
The voice said, “We are from what you know
as the planet Mars” (Schwarz, 1983). Asked
what he was doing, Wilcox explained that he
was spreading manure. The Martian wanted
to know what manure was, and he asked a se¬
ries of questions about it. He said he would
like a sample of it, but when Wilcox volun¬
teered to go to the barn to retrieve some, the
alien changed the subject. They could come
to Earth only every two years, he said, and
warned would-be travelers from Earth to stay
away from Mars, since its conditions are in¬
hospitable to human life. They were here to
study the Earth’s organic life, and they said
something that Wilcox understood to mean
that “the earth and Mars, plus some other
planets, might be changed around.” They also
predicted that within a year two American as¬
tronauts, John Glenn and Virgil (Gus) Gris¬
som, and two Soviet cosmonauts would be
killed. They said that other Martian ships
were surveying the Earth.

After two hours, the conversation ended.
The Martians said that Wilcox should not tell
anyone about the exchange “for your own
good,” though Wilcox did not interpret this
as a threat.

All the while, Wilcox would tell family
members, he suspected that he was at the re¬
ceiving end of a hoax engineered by the televi¬
sion show Candid Camera. He found a jelly-
like substance on the ground where the UFO
had been, but he could not pick it up. It
slipped through his fingers.

Wilcox confided the story to family mem¬
bers and friends. The matter probably would
have ended there if two local women, who
worked with Floyd Wilcox, Gary’s younger
brother, had not heard the story. Both be¬
longed to a Washington-based UFO organiza¬
tion. They asked permission to interview
Gary Wilcox, who provided them with a short
statement. A neighbor woman interested in

268 Williamson, George Hunt

UFOs spoke with him at greater length and
examined the landing site, but rain had
washed away whatever might have been there
originally. She alerted the sheriff’s office,
which sent a deputy to investigate. On May 7
a detailed account appeared in the Bingham -
ton Press, after a reporter spoke with a reluc¬
tant Wilcox. Subsequently, Walter N. Webb,
an astronomer and field investigator for the
National Investigations Committee on Aerial
Phenomena, spoke with Wilcox and others.
“Neighbors, friends, and authorities unani¬
mously agreed that Wilcox had a good reputa¬
tion in the area,” Webb would write. Wilcox
had no previous history of interest in the eso¬
teric and in fact was not much of a reader.

A psychiatric examination conducted by
Berthold Eric Schwarz, M.D., a psychothera¬
pist, concluded that Wilcox suffered no men¬
tal abnormalities. Unlike many figures in the
contactee movement, Wilcox made no at¬
tempt to exploit his alleged experience. He
discussed it only when asked, and with no¬
table hesitation. He made no further claims of
encounters with extraterrestrials.

See Also: Allingham’s Martian; Aurora Martian;
Brown’s Martians; Close encounters of the third
kind; Dentonss Martians and Venusians; Hop¬
kins’s Martians; Khauga; Martian bees; Mince-
Pie Martians; Monka; Muller’s Martians; Shaw’s
Martians

Further Reading

Hotchkiss, Olga M., 1964. “New York UFO and Its
‘Little People’.” Fate 17, 9 (September): 38-42.

Ochs, Reid A., 1964. “Martian ‘Visit’ Stirs Tioga.”
Binghamton [New York] Press (May 7).

Schwarz, Berthold E., 1983. UFO-Dynamics: Psychi -
atric and Psychic Aspects of the UFO Syndrome.
Two volumes. Moore Haven, FL: Rainbow
Books.

Webb, Walter N., 1965. The Newark Valley-Conklin,
New York, Incidents: The Binghamton Area Flap of
1964. Cambridge, MA: self-published.

Williamson, George Hunt (1926-1986)

George Hunt Williamson was a leading figure
in the contactee movement of the 1950s. On
that fringe he even had a reputation as a
scholar and deep thinker, even if by main¬

stream standards his ideas about ancient and
modern visitations from space by friendly and
hostile extraterrestrials seemed the product of
a fertile, even crankish imagination. William¬
son claimed not only to have witnessed
George Adamski’s meeting with a Venusian in
the California desert in November 1952 but
also to have had contacts with space people
himself. A colorful, intelligent, and educated
man, Williamson advanced many ideas that
still circulate in popular culture, though he
himself dropped out of sight in the 1960s and
died in obscurity in Long Beach, California,
in January 1986.

Born in Chicago, Williamson pursued ar¬
chaeological and anthropological interests in
college. Several psychic experiences in his
youth drew him to the occult and the para¬
normal, and then to flying saucers. He had
close contacts with the Chippewa and the
Hopi and lived with them in the early 1950s.
In 1952, while residing in Prescott, Arizona,
he and his wife, Betty, met Alfred and Betty
Bailey. The two couples attempted to contact
saucers and soon began receiving messages,
through automatic writing and the ouija
board, from visitors from Venus, Mars,
Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune. Then one mes¬
sage, from Zo of Neptune, informed them
that they would be receiving Morse code sig¬
nals on the radio. They were instructed to ap¬
proach one of Baileys coworkers, Lyman
Streeter, who was a ham-radio operator. Soon
Streeter, his wife, and the two other couples
were hearing from extraterrestrials with color¬
ful names: Zo, Affa, Um, and Regga. Further
communications took place through radio
and mental telepathy.

Through his reading, Williamson heard of
George Adamski, a Californian who was pro¬
ducing pictures of alleged spacecraft. The two
exchanged letters, and Adamski invited
Williamson to visit him at his home in Palo-
mar Gardens. In the presence of the
Williamsons and the Baileys, Adamski chan¬
neled messages from space people. On No¬
vember 20, alerted that a landing would
occur, the two couples met with Adamski and

Williamson, George Hunt 269

George Hunt Williamson (left), who received regtdar radio messages from extraterrestrials in the early 1950s (Fortean
Picture Library)

two associates along the California-Arizona
border. The other six would sign affidavits at¬
testing to their observation (albeit from some
distance) of Adamski’s meeting with a space¬
man. (Later the Baileys would withdraw their
testimony, saying they had seen nothing out
of the ordinary.)

Williamson went on to write a series of
books both about his contacts and about his
theories about the role space people have
played in the human past and present. Such
books as Other Tongues—Other Flesh (1953),
Secret Places of the Lion (1958), and Road in the
Sky (1959) anticipated themes that Erich von
Daniken and others would popularize in the
1970s during the “ancient astronauts” craze.
Williamson split with Adamski after the latter
urged him not to publicize his psychic con¬
tacts, since Adamski decried such methods of
communications to his followers, even while
privately practicing them. But Williamson

delved ever deeper into the occult and pursued
his own attempts at space communication by
various means. In 1955, he and Richard Miller
formed the Telonic Research Center to estab¬
lish radio and other contacts with extraterres¬
trials, though within months he and Miller
parted amid much mutual recrimination.

The following year he joined up with the
Brotherhood of the Seven Rays, a band of psy¬
chics and contactees (including Dorothy Mar¬
tin, better known as Sister Thedra), and spent
a year at its colony in a remote area of Peru,
convinced that cataclysmic Earth changes
were soon to occur. When they did not,
Williamson and everyone except Martin re¬
turned to the United States. There William¬
son resumed writing books, one of them a
thinly disguised anti-Semitic work titled
UFOs Confidential! (1958). In 1958, he went
on a world tour and, in 1961, he lectured in
Japan, where he was treated as something of a

270 Wilson

celebrity. His last book, which he wrote under
the pseudonym “Brother Philip,” was pub¬
lished the same year. Soon, however, William¬
son—now calling himself Michel d’Obren-
ovic—retired from a public career and was so
little heard from that many thought him
dead.

During his heyday, critics accused William¬
son of a range of shortcomings and base moti¬
vations, among them bigotry, paranoia, and
charlatanism. His shrillest attackers, associ¬
ated with James W. Moseley’s Saucer News,
debunked Williamson’s assertions about his
academic background (far from being a
Ph.D., as he said he was, he did not have even
an undergraduate degree), and one reviewer
noted similarities between the supposedly
nonfictional Road in the Sky and a science-fic¬
tion series by Isaac Asimov. After his death,
however, scientist and UFO historian Michael
D. Swords acquired the bulk of Williamson’s
collection, which includes a massive amount
of private correspondence and other material.
Based on his reading of it, Swords concludes
that for all his exaggeration and credential-
inflation, Williams was essentially honest. In
his estimation Williamson “actually believed
all the stuff—the wild, amazing, impossible-
to-believe stuff—that he wrote about. . . .
Williamson is not easy to explain and cannot
be deposited into some conveniently labeled
box” (Swords, 1993).

See Also: Adamski, George; Affa; Contactees; Sister
Thedra

Further Reading

Brother Philip [pseud, of George Hunt Williamson],
1961. Secret of the Andes. Clarksburg, WV:
Saucerian Books.

Griffin, John, 1989. Visitants. Santa Barbara, CA:
self-published.

Ibn Aharon, Y. N. [pseud, of Yonah Fortner], 1960.
Review of Road in the Sky. Saucer Nexus 7, 2
(June): 6.

Leslie, Desmond, and George Adamski, 1953. Flying
Saucers Have Landed. New York: British Book
Centre.

Moseley, James W., and Michael G. Mann, 1959.
“Screwing the Lid down on ‘Doctor’
Williamson.” Saucer News 6, 2 (February/
March): 3-5.

Swords, Michael D., 1993. “UFOs and the Amish.”
International UFO Reporter 18, 5 (September/
October): 12-13.

Williamson, George Hunt, 1953. Other Tongues —
Other Flesh. Amherst, WI: Amherst Press.

-, 1958. Secret Places of the Lion. Amherst,

WI: Amherst Press.

-, 1959. Road in the Sky. London: Neville

Spearman.

Williamson, George Hunt, and Alfred C. Bailey,
1954. The Saucers Speak!A Documentary Report of
Interstellar Communication by Radiotelegraphy.
Los Angeles: New Age Publishing Company.
Williamson, George Hunt, and John McCoy, 1958.
UFOs Confidential! The Meaning behind the
Most Closely Guarded Secret of All Time. Corpus
Christi, TX: Essene Press.

Wilson

During the spring of 1897, American news¬
papers reported frequently outlandish ac¬
counts of mysterious “airships,” dirigible- or
cigar-shaped structures whose origins were
(and still are) shrouded in mystery. Some
people speculated that they housed Martian
visitors, and indeed some spectacular hoaxes
played to that belief. The more common the¬
ory, however, held that an enterprising Amer¬
ican had invented advanced aircraft and was
flying it around the country with a crew of
aeronauts. Stories carried in the press re¬
ported meetings with the enigmatic inventor,
though most were contradictory and dubi¬
ous. Historians of aviation have ignored this
episode, and today only ufologists have exam¬
ined it carefully, holding that the airship scare
was an early UFO wave. Among the more cu¬
rious accounts to be published in the press of
the period were a series of ostensibly related
incidents, all but one of which occurred in
Texas, involving an aeronaut identified as
“Wilson.”

Someone who may have been Wilson ap¬
pears first in an alleged encounter near
Greenville, Texas, late on the evening of April
16, according to a letter C. G. Williams pub¬
lished in the Dallas Morning News on the
nineteenth. Williams reportedly saw an “im¬
mense cigar-shaped vessel” as he was taking a

Wilson 271

walk. Three crew members stepped outside,
two to work on the structure, the third to chat
with the witness. The stranger told Williams
that he had built the ship after many years of
experiment and error “at a little town in the
interior of New York.”

The May 16 issue of the same newspaper
carried a letter forwarded by Dr. D. H.
Tucker. Tucker said that a young man who
subsequently drowned in a flood in Missis¬
sippi had written the original, recounting an
experience that occurred on April 19 in the
Lake Charles, Louisiana, area. While riding in
his buggy, he spotted an airship approaching.
A high-pitched whistle from the vessel
spooked his horses, and he was thrown to the
ground. When the ship landed, two men
rushed from it to help him to his feet and to
extend their apologies. One introduced him¬
self as “Mr. Wilson,” though the witness
doubted that was his real name. Wilson stated
that he and his companion, Scott Warren, had
invented a fleet of ships. They were now seek¬
ing to demonstrate that long-distance airship
travel was safe and economical. The young
man was invited to tour the vehicle, where he
met two other crew members.

That same day, at around 11 P.M., at Beau¬
mont, Texas, according to an account pub¬
lished in the Houston Daily Post of April 21,
lights in a neighbor’s pasture caught the eyes
of J. R. Ligon and his son Charley. They ob -
served “four men moving around a large dark
object” that they recognized, as they ap¬
proached it, as an airship. Its crew asked for
water and accompanied the two to the house,
where they filled their buckets. “I accosted
one of the men,” the elder Ligon reported,
“and he told me his name was Wilson. . . .
They were returning from a trip out on the
Gulf and were now headed toward Iowa,
where the airship was built.” It was one of five
that had been constructed there. The Ligons
accompanied them back to the ship, a huge
structure 136 feet long and 20 feet wide, with
four large wings and propellers attached to
bow and stern. Wilson explained it was pow¬
ered by “electricity.”

On April 25 the New Orleans Daily Pica -
yune carried an interview with a visitor, Rabbi
A. Levy of Beaumont. Levi recalled that “about
10 days ago,” on hearing that an airship had
landed late that night on a farm just outside
town, he hastened to the site. There sat an air¬
ship some 150 feet long with 100-foot wings.
“I spoke to one of the men when he went into
the farmer’s house, and shook hands with
him,” Levy claimed. “Yes, I did hear him say
where it was built, but I can’t remember the
name of the place, or the name of the inventor.
He said that they had been traveling a great
deal, and were testing the machine. I was do
dumbfounded that I could not frame an intel¬
ligent question to ask.” He did remember,
though, that “electricity” powered the craft.

At Uvalde, three hundred miles southwest
of Beaumont, twenty-three hours after the
Ligons’s alleged encounter, Sheriff H. W. Bay¬
lor witnessed an airship landing near his home.
Baylor saw three crew members and spoke
with one, a Mr. Wilson, a native of Goshen,
New York. The aeronaut recalled an old friend,
Captain C. C. Akers, whom he said he had
known in Fort Worth. Now, he understood,
Akers lived in the area. Baylor replied that he
knew Akers, who was employed as a customs
officer in Eagle Pass but who frequently visited
Uvalde. After asking the sheriff to give his best
to Akers, Wilson and his crew flew away. The
Houston Daily Post, which reported the story
in its April 21 issue, mentioned the sighting,
the same night as Baylor’s alleged encounter
with Wilson, of an airship passing just north
of the Baylor residence. Contacted by the Gal -
veston Daily News (April 28), Akers confirmed
that twenty years earlier he had known “a man
by the name of Wilson from New York
state. . . . He was of a mechanical turn of mind
and was then working on aerial navigation and
something that would astonish the world.”

At midnight on April 22, east of Josserand
(seventy-five miles northwest of Beaumont), a
“whirring noise” awoke farmer Frank Nichols,
according to the Houston Daily Post (April
26). On investigating, he spotted a large, bril¬
liantly lighted airship in his cornfield. Two

272 Wilson

crew members asked if they could draw water
from his well. Afterward, they invited him
into the craft, which had a six- or eight-man
crew. One told him that “highly condensed
electricity” powered it. It was one of five built
in a small Iowa town.

The following evening an airship landed at
Kountze, twenty miles northwest of Beau¬
mont. Onlookers talked with its pilots, Wilson
and Jackson, who said it would take a few days
to complete necessary repairs. The Houston
Daily Post (April 25) assured readers that any¬
one who wanted to see the marvelous machine
“may do so by coming to Kountze any time
before Monday night.” This is the one Wilson
story that was an obvious practical joke.

On April 30, the Daily Post carried a letter
from H. C. Legrone of Deadwood, 130 miles
north of Beaumont. Legrone wrote that after
something disturbed his horses on the evening
of April 28, he stepped outside to observe an
approaching airship. It descended on a nearby
field. He related,

Its crew was composed of five men, three of
whom entertained me, while the other two
took rubber bags and went for a supply of
water at my well, 100 yards off. They informed
me that this was one of five ships that had been
traveling the country over recently, and that
this individual ship was the same one recently
landed near Beaumont. . . after having trav¬
eled pretty well all over the Northwest. They
stated that these ships were put up in an inte¬
rior town in Illinois. They were rather reticent
about giving out information in regards to the
ship, manufacture, etc., since they had not yet
secured everything by patent.

Whatever the airships may or may not
have been, they were nobody’s inventions,
and the name of the mysterious Mr. Wilson is
not to be found in any history of aviation.
Put bluntly, the stories make no sense. They
could not have happened in any way in
which the verb “happened” is ordinarily un¬
derstood. In light of the numerous hoaxes,
journalistic and other, the Wilson stories,
however intriguing, must be viewed with a
fair degree of suspicion. Nonetheless, occult-
oriented writers such as John A. Keel argue
that the seemingly normal American pilots
reported in 1897 press accounts were actually
supernatural entities—Keel calls them ultra¬
terrestrials—in disguise. According to Keel,
the ultraterrestrials staged encounters “in rel¬
atively remote places,” contacting a few wit¬
nesses and passing on bogus tales “which
would discredit not only them but the whole
mystery. Knowing how we think and how we
search for consistencies, the ultraterrestrials
were careful to sow inconsistencies in their
wake” (Keel, 1970).

See Also: Keel, John Alva; Smith; Ultraterrestrials

Further Reading

Bullard, Thomas E., ed., 1982. The Airship File: A
Collection of Texts Concerning Phantom Airships
and Other UFOs, Gathered from Newspapers and
Periodicals Mostly during the Htmdred Years Prior
to Kenneth Arnold’s Sighting. Bloomington, IN:
self-published.

Chariton, Wallace O., 1991. The Great Texas Airship
Mystery. Plano, TX: Wordware Publishing.

Cohen, Daniel, 1981. The Great Airship Mystery: A
UFO of the 1890s. New York: Dodd, Mead, and
Company.

Keel, John A., 1970. UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse.
New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

Xeno

In the early morning hours of January 30,
1965, while walking along a beach near Wat¬
sonville, California, Sid Padrick saw a flying
saucer descend and hover a foot or two above
the sand. A voice speaking from the craft as¬
sured him that he was not in danger. When a
door opened, Padrick entered and soon met a
human-looking figure in a two-piece uniform.
The figure, speaking in unaccented English,
introduced himself as Xeno. He took Padrick
on a tour of the craft, during which he saw
eight other crew members, one a “very pretty”
young woman. They paid little attention to
Padrick, and all his communication was with
Xeno.

Xeno and his companions were light¬
skinned and resembled human beings except
for unusually sharp chins and noses. Xeno ex¬
plained that the ship and its crew came from a
planet behind a planet visible from Earth.
Their own planet, however, was always hid¬
den from earthly view. They lived in a com¬
munal society without war, disease, or crime.
They also had a religion that worshipped the
Supreme Deity. During the tour Padrick was
shown a “consultation room” used for worship
and invited to go inside. After he prayed
there, Padrick experienced a kind of religious
awakening.

During their interaction, he noticed that
whenever he would ask Xeno a question,
Xeno would hesitate for as long as half a
minute before answering. Patrick speculated
that he was getting telepathic instructions on
how to reply. He was shown a photograph of a
city on Xeno’s planet. Through a telescopelike
device he observed a cigar-shaped mother ship
which had brought the smaller craft through
space.

Padrick was told that Xeno’s people were
here only to explore. They had no desire for
contact because of earthlings’ hostility and
generally primitive attitudes. After about two
hours, Padrick left the craft with a promise
that he would meet the space people again
soon.

On February 4, Padrick informed Hamil¬
ton Air Force Base of his experience. A U.S.
Air Force officer, Major D. B. Reeder, inter¬
viewed him four days later, and the two went
to the encounter site. Though the officer in¬
terviewed several locals who said Padrick was
trustworthy, the officer did not believe his tes¬
timony and urged Project Blue Book, the U.S.
Air Force’s UFO-investigative group, to take
no further action.

Nonetheless, after seeing the story in a San
Francisco newspaper, L. D. Cody, the civilian
director of aerospace education at Hamilton,

273

274 Xeno

requested a full briefing from Reeder. Later
that month, Cody personally interviewed
Padrick and his family. In his estimation
Padrick “seemed sincere.” He thought Padrick
had either had the experience or dreamed it
(Cody, 1967).

After accounts of Padrick’s alleged experi¬
ence were published in the press, he was be¬
sieged by letters and calls from UFO buffs.
One pointed out that “Xeno”—heretofore
Padrick had spelled the name phonetically as
“Zeno”—is Greek for “stranger.”

Following the initial publicity, Padrick did
a few lectures and spoke at several contactee
conferences, sticking to his basic story with¬
out elaboration, but then dropped out of
sight. In 1970, local newspapers reported that
a friend was suing Padrick, who had borrowed
one thousand dollars to write a book detailing
his experience but had not repaid it or even

been able to produce evidence that a manu¬
script existed. Padrick insisted that a third
person had borrowed the manuscript and
never returned it. The San Jose Municipal
Court decreed that Padrick had to make good
on the loan.

From some accounts Padrick had further
alien contacts after the January 1965 inci¬
dent, but he has never spoken about them in
public.

See Also: Contactees

Further Reading

Cody, L. D., 1967. Letter to James E. McDonald
(August 25).

“Contactee Loses Court Case,” 1971. UFO Investi -
gator (April): 1.

“The Padrick ‘Space Contact,’” 1965. Little Listening
Post 12, 3 (August/September/October): 2-5.

“Watsonville’s Weird Story —A Ride on a Space¬
ship,” 1965. San Francisco News Call Btdletin
(February 12).

Yada di Shi’ite

Yada di Shi’ite lived five-hundred thousand
years ago, a member of the ancient civilization
of Yu, located in the Himalayas, or so he told
San Diego medium Mark Probert, through
whom he channeled from the 1940s until
Probert’s death in 1969. Yada di Shi’ite was
one of several entities who composed the
Inner Circle.

Probert, a man with little formal educa¬
tion, entered the metaphysical realm when he
started talking in his sleep. His wife, Irene,
took note of what he was saying. Soon the
episode became known to a local man, veteran
occultist N. Meade Layne. Layne took over
Probert’s spiritual education, and soon Yada di
Shi’ite and others were speaking through the
medium. The others included Ramon Natalli,
in life a lawyer and a friend of Galileo; Profes¬
sor Alfred Luntz, a nineteenth-century Angli¬
can clergyman; and Charles Lingford, in life a
dancer and artist.

Through Probert’s Inner Circle Kethra
E’Da Foundation and Layne’s better-known
Borderland Sciences Research Associates, the
channelings of Yada di Shi’ite and associ¬
ates—eventually their number expanded to
eleven—found an international audience. In
the early age of flying saucers, the late 1940s
and early 1950s, the Circle’s pronouncements

on the subject were particularly influential,
and they founded the basis of Layne’s The
Ether Ship and Its Solution (1950), which was
widely read in fringe circles and is still an in¬
fluence on latter-day occult saucer theorists
such as John A. Keel.

Further Reading

Barker, Gray, 1956. They Knew Too Much about Fly -
ing Saucers. New York: University Books.

Layne, N. Meade, The Ether Ship and Its Solution.
Vista, CA: Borderland Sciences Research Asso¬
ciates.

Yamski

On April 24, 1965, just a day after the death
of George Adamski, a flying saucer allegedly
landed near the Devonshire village of Scori-
ton. Three humanlike beings clad in space-
suits emerged. One, who looked like a youth
of thirteen or fourteen, identified himself as
“Yamski” to the sole witness, a groundskeeper
and handyman named Ernest Arthur Bryant.
Yamski, who spoke in Eastern European-
inflected English, expressed the wish that
“Des” or “Les” could be there. Bryant was
given a brief tour of the craft and a promise of
further contacts.

Some of Adamski’s partisans had been ex¬
pecting him to reincarnate and return to

275

276 Y’hova

Earth. In fact, his associate and onetime co¬
author Desmond Leslie openly predicted it in
an obituary he wrote for England’s Flying
Saucer Review. Bryant, who claimed never to
have heard of this famous contactee, produced
a sketch of Yamski, who bore some resem¬
blance to a youthful Adamski. Subsequently,
Bryant brought forth physical evidence that
he said the space people had given him.

In 1967, Eileen Buckle, who had investi¬
gated the case, wrote about it in a thick book
that essentially endorsed the case, notwith¬
standing growing evidence that Bryant had a
hard time telling the truth even about the
most mundane aspects of his life. Bryant died
just after Buckle’s book was published. British
ufologist Norman Oliver, who interviewed
Bryant’s wife around that time, was told that
Bryant’s story was bogus. He had based it on
his considerable reading of UFO and occult
literature and his extensive knowledge of
Adamski’s claims. Oliver exposed the many
dubious elements of the case in a self-pub¬
lished monograph.

See Also: Adamski, George; Contactees

Further Reading

Buckle, Eileen, 1967. The Scoriton Mystery. London:
Neville Spearman.

Leslie, Desmond, 1965. “Obituary: George Adam¬
ski.” Flying Saucer Review 11, 4 (July/August):
18-19.

Oliver, Norman, 1968. Sequel to Scoriton. London:
self-published.

Y’hova

According to the “extraterrestrialism” theories
of Yonah Fortner (who wrote under the pseu¬
donym Y. N. ibn Aharon), visitors from other

worlds landed on Earth and interacted with
its most advanced ancient civilizations, no¬
tably those of the Chaldeans and the At-
lanteans. The Chaldeans, who possessed an
advanced technology, were especially close to
aliens, even intermarrying with one group, the
Elohim. Another group was the Titans, who
helped the Chaldeans vanquish the malevo¬
lent alien race known as the Serpent People.
Eventually, warfare among alien races broke
out on the Earth’s surface. In the midst of this
conflict, one alien showed up around 1340
B.C. Shaday Elili Athunu, otherwise known
as Y’hova, befriended a local malcontent
named Abraham, whom he promised to pro¬
tect if he, his family, and his people followed
him. Y’hova is known to humans as God.

Fortner stated that the “God of Israel
should not be confused with the general run
of space visitors because he was either unique
or very nearly unique in his decision to make
a career among the people of earth. . . . [He]
is a very august and ancient being. . . who
comes from a higher order of being, a dimen¬
sion beyond all known dimensions” (Stein¬
berg, 1977).

Fortner outlined his theories in a series of
articles published in Saucer News between
1957 and I960. His sources, he insisted, were
rare and arcane Middle Eastern documents,
but when challenged, he was unable to prove
that they existed.

Further Reading

Ibn Aharon, Y. N. [pseud, of Yonah Fortner], 1960.
“A Note on the Evolution of Extraterrestrialism.”
Saucer News 7, 4 (December): 6-9.

Steinberg, Gene, 1977. “Dr. Yonah Aharon—Origi¬
nator of the Ancient Astronaut Theory.” UFO
Report 4, 2 (June): 26-27, 74-78.

Zagga

Zagga hails from the planet Zakton at the far
side of the Milky Way galaxy. Zakton is some
seventy-five thousand light years beyond
Gemini. One of the twelve members of the
Galactic Council, he was sent to Saturn. From
there he transited to Earth, entering the body
of a boy at the instant of birth. Zagga claims
that on his home planet children are con¬
ceived not by sexual intercourse but by pure
thought. People do not have names. He was
given the appellation “Zagga” only after he
volunteered for the Earth mission. In letters
to saucerian writer John W. Dean, Zagga at¬
tested to the authenticity of George Adamski’s
claim to have attended an interplanetary con¬
ference on Saturn in March 1962.

According to Dean, Zagga was “a fine look¬
ing young man of about twenty-five years of
age” in 1961 when Dean met him at Buck
Nelson’s contactee convention in Missouri.
Zagga told Dean, “I had known the one you
call Jesus before and after his incarnation on
earth. I know Him as a great friend” (Dean,
1964). Dean said he knew Zagga’s earthly
name and address but was not to reveal them.

See Also: Adamski, George; Contactees

Further Reading

Dean, John W., 1964. Flying Saucers and the Scrip -
tures. New York: Vantage Press.

Zandark

In the fall of 1973, an anonymous woman re¬
ceived psychic communications from Zan¬
dark, a “member of the United Cosmic Coun¬
cil; a Commander in Chief in Charge of
Directing Technical Transmissions Via Mental
Telepathy of the Combination of Medium-
istic Telepathy under the Direction of the
Confederation of Cosmic Space Beings”
(Keel, 1975). Zandark’s people are here to
bring peace, and they have been here a long
time. They built the Sphinx, the pyramids,
and other classic ancient structures.

Further Reading

Keel, John A., 1975. The Mothman Prophecies. New
York: Saturday Review Press/E. P. Dutton and
Company.

Zolton

In a registered letter sent to U.S. Air Force In¬
telligence on November 20, 1953, an uniden¬
tified woman mailed a recently channeled
message from an Ashtar associate named
Zolton, “Commander from the center of the
Sector System of Vela.” Zolton sought to alert
the authorities in Washington to the space
people’s purpose.

He warned the Pentagon that visiting ex¬
traterrestrials knew of “destructive plans for-

277

278 Zolton

mulated for offensive and defensive war” and
were prepared to stop them by crippling
earthly weapons technology without hurting
any person or thing. The visitors would not
hesitate, however, to “control minds ... in

order to secure this solar system. This is a
friendly warning” (Wilkins, 1955).

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